Controlware Communications Systems

Mission
Centrally situated in the booming southeast region of Queensland Australia, Ipswich comprises an area of 1207 square kilometres and has a population of 150,000 people. Ipswich Council pioneered public surveillance in Australia with an analogue CCTV solution that in its day gave law enforcement agencies unprecedented coverage of public spaces. The council turned to specialists Controlware to upgrade their surveillance system in order to take advantage of new technologies and improve the flexibility and scalability of the system.

Solution
The powerful new soluion includes IP transmisson for over 100 cameras, networked recording and advanced management for for surveillance of real-time and recorded video. The cameras are spread across a wide area that includes six separate suburban districts. In each district there is a hub site that connects back to the control room over wireless, multimode or single mode fiber connections.

Ipswich Council’s Stacey Kirmos says that operationally both control room staff and police love the new system – police can identify an event and come into the control room and search for an incident then burn their own evidential DVDs. “Operators get all the possible performance they could want,” Kirmos says. “With the storage they’re able to playback incidents in their original quality in real time even if those events occurred weeks before – that’s a major advantage and it gives us real continuity when investigations are being carried out.”

Result
The powerful IP CCTV solution improves operational performance and flexibility while saving costs. From a management perspective the new system is much simpler to use. Cameras can easily be grouped together thereby automating procedures. At a click of a button, for example, titled “hotels” all the cameras move to a preset position to show live images of the hotels on the video wall in a pre-configured layout.
According to Kirmos, the changeover was straightforward and careful planned and implementation saw both old and new control rooms working side by side in a fully duplicated environment before the old control room was closed down. “Dollars aside this conversion was very much about performance,” Kirmos says. “This system is giving us real time video at DVD quality on all channels so we’re very happy with the performance.”