From “Plug & Pray” to Plug and Play!

Anyone who’s been in the wireless or CCTV surveillance business for a while will come across the occasional failed project from another vendor. Often we find out about these because a client contacts us at their wit’s end, unable to get a system they bought sometime ago to work correctly. When you start to dig into the details, you sometimes have to say to yourself “what was that vendor thinking?!?” This has been happening to us a lot lately…

We were recently asked to provide an estimate on a multi-camera wireless IP surveillance system for a bridge crossing the river in the center of a large Midwestern city. Our first discussions with the client, revealed that the proposed installation was not going to be a new project, rather, it was to be a complete replacement of an existing wireless IP CCTV installation covering the bridge, with additional wireless backhauls spanning many miles of the downtown area – a system that had been installed, at great expense, TWO YEARS AGO and had never worked correctly!

So what were the circumstances, and who was the vendor? Well it took some research to get the answer, but the vendor is a major manufacturer of wireless mesh equipment for the video surveillance arena, well known to us, and with a decent reputation. Even though I strongly prefer Qorvus solutions, I knew enough about the other company’s equipment to be reasonably sure that it would function properly if correctly architected and installed. So what went wrong? 

After hearing most of the details from the client, I put the failure of the project down to a combination of the other manufacturer’s aggressive salesmanship,  lazy system design, and AWOL customer support. Anyone familiar with wireless mesh equipment, including ours, knows that it’s capable of automatically routing data through multiple hops from a wireless camera to the main office. It will attempt to do this even in very unfavorable conditions like poor radio links or outside interference. That’s what makes mesh a great choice for battlefield use where you’re trying to get that text or data message from one armored vehicle to another. But RELYING ON AUTOMATED MESH ROUTING ALONE TO CARRY STREAMING VIDEO IS FOOLISH. The required throughput is far higher than text data, and you simply MUST have the best possible wireless links throughout your system to guarantee a decent frame-rate.

That’s where the other wireless manufacturer’s sales and service team apparently fell down. Instead of engineering the entire wireless surveillance system ahead of time, including appropriate selection of directional antennas, node locations for best quality links, etc., they just shipped all the camera wireless networking equipment to the field equipped with omni antennas (BTW omni’s are an absolute no-no at 5Ghz esp. in outdoor urban areas), and apparently told the installers something like “ just install these where you want the video and our wireless mesh software will automatically figure everything out.”

That approach is what I call “Plug and Pray” and it’s what has given some VARs and end-users a bad taste in their mouths when it comes to long-range wireless video and wireless mesh.  Outdoor wireless video surveillance projects in urban areas are challenging because they already have lots of other wireless activity and interference in the commonly used ISM bands, and you can experience problems getting good line-of-sight between nodes while maintaining good, interference-resistant link quality.  Especially in these types of installations, careful architecting of the entire system, including node and repeater location, antenna selection, elevation and orientation, and link capacity engineering are CRITICAL to achieve acceptable reliability and frame rates. The other company apparently didn’t address these important areas. I don’t want to pick on anyone, but this was clearly a big mistake, and one that proves once again the old adage that when you have a choice, “you shouldn’t try to fix a hardware problem with a software solution.”

Qorvus never does “plug and pray” installations, and you won’t have to, either. We will help you design your client’s entire installation based on careful consultation with your sales and technical staff and a thorough review of the proposed locations using Google Earth or other mapping data.  That way each piece of equipment arrives pre-configured, ready to go in the indicated location, properly documented, and with needed accessory items like antennas and interface cables correctly selected ahead of time. This means that a Qorvus solution, if installed in accordance with the supplied instructions, will come up working properly out of the box. In case some additional field adjustments or changes are required for optimum performance, we can easily access the installed network via our secure VPN tunneling system and generally make those changes for you on-the-fly. In the rare event we need to make a change to e.g. an antenna, we’ll generally overnight those out to you at no additional charge. The end result – shorter installation times, lower costs, fewer return visits, and happy clients!

(the above was originally published in the Qorvus Qnews newsletter of April, 2009)