If the Beach Boys had grown up in early 21st century Cornwall instead of 1960s California, they might have spent as much of their time surfing the web as surfing the waves. Treviglas Community College, located on the outskirts of UK surfing haven Newquay, has offered its students a Cisco Networking Academy since 2001. And two years later, the college formally established its Technicians’ Academy in response to a perceived need for more ‘hands-on’ computer science courses in the south-west of England.
What with gaining Business and Enterprise Specialist School status; an injection of funding, amounting to an additional GB pound 30,000 per year for five years; the construction of new facilities, including two new science laboratories and a purpose-built music technology department; and a four-fold expansion of the sixth-form intake to 230 in the last four years, the college has seemingly gone from strength to strength. But there was one black mark labelled ‘could do better’: the school’s ten-year-old, analogue-based CCTV system.
Left in limbo
The cameras were failing to deliver pictures of high enough quality to positively identify individuals involved in suspect behaviour on school grounds. Assistant head teacher, Gary Durbin, explains: “The old system had often left staff compromised because we could not be sure who, if anyone, had been involved in a recorded incident. We found ourselves backing away on several occasions from dealing with individuals within the wider community, as a result of incidents on the college site, because of the poor-quality CCTV images.”
Any new system, it was decided, had to generate and efficiently store images of sufficient quality to positively identify individuals for use as evidence, in the event of certain actions being committed against the site or another person. It was envisaged that a modern CCTV system should also act as an effective deterrent to poor behaviour among pupils, covering areas such as corridors and stair-wells, where pushing and shoving and potential cases of bullying could occur.
Network integrator Perkins Communications, which had been working closely with the college to upgrade its IT network, was commissioned to produce a report on the failings of the CCTV system and make recommendations for updating it (see panel, opposite). Following the presentation of the report in April 2004, a tender process ensued with a number of local CCTV installers being invited to bid alongside Perkins. But, with one successful project already behind it, Perkins was in a strong position and, in June 2004, it was awarded the IP security contract.
Campus coverage
The new system is built around two Axis 241Q video servers. Both relay images from four analogue cameras onto the network. A total of 18 Axis 211 network cameras and one 2130 PTZ network camera were deployed across the entire campus. Together with the analogue cameras, these feed into a Milestone XProtect Enterprise Version 5 system for handling, storage and management of camera output.
Providing coverage over the adjoining primary school’s playground, as well as the college buildings and fields, the PTZ camera is situated on an 8m tilt-over column in a glass dome housing. According to the college, the camera has helped to reduce incidents of vandalism across both sites.
It has also helped to stop pupils from using a large tree in the corner of the fields to smoke behind. Durbin explains: “By illustrating to known culprits that we could now zoom in on the tree to a degree that we could positively identify them, we were able to stamp out smoking in this area almost entirely.”
A Dell server with 700Gb SATA drives has been deployed to hold all images, which are kept for nine days and are archived for a total of 30 days on both hard drives and a Sony Ait 3 drive with 100Gb tape storage. Image recording is motion-triggered and recorded at a maximum of 25 frames per second using medium compression ratios and 640×480 viewing resolution.
The quality of the images captured has helped the college to deal effectively with all sorts of incidents, as Durbin describes: “We have used video evidence to explore alleged vandalism of a car on college grounds. In one particular case we found that a visitor, who had claimed to have had his car damaged in the car park of the college, had, in fact, arrived in the morning with the dent already in his car door but he had not spotted it before arriving.”
Ethernet enabled
The use of Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) network cameras negated the lack of power outlets in particular corridors. In addition, the presence of asbestos in one building meant that any new wires would have needed to be carried in unsightly plastic retainers, which tended to fall or be ripped off walls and ceilings over time. And an incident in June 2003, in which someone had disabled a camera simply by opening up a fused supply box, also illustrated the benefit of opting for PoE-enabled devices.
Expanding further on the benefits of centralised power management for IP-surveillance systems, Keith Perkins of Perkins Communications, said: “PoE has a potential additional advantage of building greater resilience into the surveillance system. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS), or 3Com’s redundant power supply can very easily be connected to each 3Com 4400 switch PWR. In other words, if electric supply is lost due to tripping or a fault in the local sub station, the surveillance system can continue running alongside the college’s computer network. Their core network switch and server can also be protected by this same UPS.”
Savings in providing a wired electricity supply, together with costs in cabling, fuse boxes and labour, were calculated at a minimum of GB pound 1800 for the 18 new cameras. These savings were enough to pay for any costs associated with deploying PoE-enabled switches, which, in total, could power 120 devices.
In order to avoid any possible abuse or misuse of surveillance images, access to the cameras direct from web browsers is prevented via strictly-enforced username and password access. A setting on the cameras also prevents anyone accessing the cameras from a separate device located on the college’s network.
Peter Botterill, the college’s network manager, remarks: “The fact that students sitting on the college local area network can’t even find the cameras on the network, let alone access them without authorisation, adds an extra layer of security, which we were keen to have in place from the outset.”
Plans afoot
The college is planning to deploy an additional three Axis 213 PTZ network cameras to monitor its remaining boundaries. It is also considering installing two further cameras in the reception area to monitor traffic in and out of the main doors, and to ensure all visitors report to reception before going any further into the building. As the Milestone XProtect system is scalable to 64 cameras, there is no danger of exceeding this level even with these new cameras. There have also been talks about extending the IP surveillance system to cover the adjacent primary school, which is linked via a fibre optic cable.
The XProtect system offers the capability of integrating the college’s access control system – which secures admission to restricted areas for authorised pupils – with the IP surveillance system. This would ensure that pupils using swipe cards to enter restricted areas, such as the sixth-form common room, would also trigger video recording so that visual identification of card holders can be verified. This may be implemented at a later date, particularly as the college begins to run more after-college courses for mature students.
Summary
Treviglas College has been able to use an upgrade of its network infrastructure to review whether its surveillance system could be effectively brought onto the network and upgraded simultaneously. The fact that these two pieces of work have happened sequentially, working with the same integration partner, Perkins, has led to savings in that very little additional network equipment was required. Significant installation savings were also gleaned from deploying Power-over-Ethernet cameras.
The final result is that the college now has a modern, fully functional and comprehensive IP surveillance system, which can be expanded as it grows and its requirements change. Now there’s some harmony even Brian Wilson and Co would have been proud of.
