AMG Systems has been selected by CK Communications to help digitise Cardiff’s traffic monitoring and CCTV network. The company has upgraded Cardiff’s traffic control rooms from analogue to IP, involving video and data at more than 30 monitoring locations across the city.
Upgrading Cardiff’s various traffic control rooms was a significant task. Across the city, the system’s monitoring stations, including 4 main control rooms and 27 remote site control desks, are used by the police and urban traffic control. In addition, a Silver Command post is used for monitoring large-scale football and rugby match days, tunnel service buildings, bus depots and more.
‘There was lots of video switching and video matrices dotted all over the place,’ states Ian Jones, Technical Director at CK Communications. ‘Our first task was to get all the camera images from the analogue world migrated to an IP front end. The product for that was Pelco, but we had to send 500 images around the city in different locations, to different control rooms. That’s where AMG came in.’
AMG helped design a system which would work best on the customer-owned fibre network in place across Cardiff. The project involved utilising Layer 2 and fibre switches located around the city. A significant factor in the installation was that the existing equipment was only able to unicast a certain number of images, so AMG provided switches for multicasting, snooping and other specific jobs.
Moving analogue cameras to IP involved using transmission equipment at the edge of the network and integration into switches built into the nodes. The new equipment includes 5900 Series hybrid units (which transmit analogue video, data, audio and Ethernet, a variety of edge-based managed and unmanaged switches, 10Gb/s managed switches and hybrid (analogue over IP) wireless links.
