Connecting five buildings with line-of-sight radios. Who Needs Wires?

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By Ryan Kaullen, Field Services Manager at Kenton Brothers

At Kenton Brothers, we get many types of requests for different scenarios and applications. We recently received a request from a customer in the Westport area of Kansas City, MO. The wanted to install video cameras at five separate buildings. And they wanted all of those video feeds to go into a video management system at one of the five locations. This can be a fairly challenging technical request. Our solution was to use Ubiquiti line-of-sight radios to communicate between the buildings. That way, we could stream the camera feeds to the centrally located recording server because they would all be on the same network.

The Ubiquiti radios are mounted on the roofs of the buildings and aimed at the main building where the recording service is housed. (All camera systems have to have a network path back to where the video is recorded.) When you’re physically located in a single building, this is a relatively easy task. In situations where there are two buildings, fiber is often in place between the buildings making a single network possible.

Kenton Brothers: Who Needs Wires? Connecting Buildings with Line of Sight Ubiquiti Radios

Fiber connections weren’t an option between all five buildings, so wireless became the solution.

 

The picture above shows one of the Ubiquiti radios. As you can see, the buildings are several blocks apart. This physical challenge made a wireless connection the ideal solution. And at the same time, it’s the most cost effective for the customer while meeting their business needs and plans for future growth.

In the past, high speed wireless systems used to be expensive, unstable, and slow. New technology like Ubiquiti’s line of products has lowered the cost, improved the stability dramatically and allows dozens of cameras to be streamed at the same time. This technology has allowed customers to cover areas of their business with commercial video surveillance that wouldn’t have been an option financially a few years ago.

Kenton Brothers has deployed dozens of wireless commercial video surveillance systems over the past 7+ years. These have been successful projects resulting in happy customers. Why? Because we’re fixing pain points in their business and making them more secure.

At Kenton Brothers, it is our mission to Protect People, Property, & Possessions. Would you like to learn more about commercial video surveillance? Give us a call!

 

Kenton Brothers: Who Needs Wires? Connecting Buildings with Line of Sight Ubiquiti Radios

COVID-19 Fighter Security Solutions – Avigilon Mask Detection

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Avigilon’s face mask detection technology can determine if a person appears on camera without face protection… and alert your team.

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People Counters and Intercoms – Adapting to this New Normal

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By Neal Bellamy, IT Director at Kenton Brothers

Like many businesses, Kenton Brothers is adapting to the “Stay at home” order and the “New Normal”. While we remain operational, we are changing our operations to reduce risk and exposure for our team and yours. One of the ways we’ve adapted is by looking at our systems and seeing what they can do for us.

With fewer people in the office, we’ve introduced some new challenges.

Commercial Counter - People Counter in ActionOne such challenge is when people come to our commercial counter. The commercial counter is not always staffed like it used to be. The employees staffing our commercial counter are still in the building, but they’re helping out other teams. We don’t want a customer waiting for service, so we looked to our systems to increase alerting.

In this case, we used the Axis “People counter” software to send alerts to our team members when someone gets to the commercial counter. This counter is loaded directly onto the camera and can send alerts from the camera itself or notify the Video Management System (VMS) which can apply more logic to the alert.

The intercoms installed at our main entrances have become even more vital.

Old intercom systems used to be answered by a physical device at one or two desks in an office or retail environment. Today, intercoms are assigned to an extension on your phone system and can be answered by any station.

Most intercom systems have mobile applications where you can see and talk to the person at the intercom from anywhere in the world. We have an Axis 8105-E and 2N Solo mounted at two of our main entrances. The person who usually answers the intercom is at home, but shifting the answering station to another person was as simple as changing the extension in our phone system. We could have enabled the mobile app for after-hours answering if that was necessary as well.

Although these are “strange times” we can look to technology to help fill some of the gaps. These tools and technologies can  increase our ability to do more with less. If you’re faced with some business or security problems in this new world, give us a call. We’re happy to help!

VIDEO: Commercial Video Surveillance 2020

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As a business owner, I’m concerned about my people, properties and possessions. A commercial video surveillance system might be the right answer.

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Share your commercial video surveillance system feed with your local police department.

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By Neal Bellamy, IT Director at Kenton Brothers.

Video cameras are everywhere in the world today. These cameras can help a city gain more situational awareness and help police fight crimes better than ever before.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the police could access any camera… at any time?

Unfortunately, video management systems can be complicated. Most video management systems are not compatible with each other. However, there is hope.

Share your commercial video surveillance feed with your local police departmentIt starts with a standard.
In order for video management systems to communicate, they must first speak the same language. In the security camera space, there is already a common standard called ONVIF (www.onvif.org ). The standard is pretty widespread. If the standard is followed, it allows for video to be streamed between a client (usually a camera) and a server (usually a video management system). The ONVIF standard does not guarantee that all of the camera’s features can be accessed, but it’s a good starting point for basic video streaming. And it works with a bridge.

What if instead of a camera being ONVIF compliant, we made a commercial video management system act like an ONVIF compliant camera or multiple cameras? The video management system is already receiving video streams… Could it send the camera stream it’s receiving somewhere else as well?

That’s exactly what Milestone is doing.

Milestone Systems

Milestone commercial video surveillance LogoMilestone systems (www.milestonesys.com) has released a server component called “ONVIF Bridge”. This allows your Milestone server system to rebroadcast the video that is being sent to another server. As long as the receiving server is ONVIF compliant (most are) it will be able to see, and optionally record, the video.

So how does this solve our problem?

If a company wants to loan some, or all of their cameras out to a police department, they can under the following conditions:

1) The company is using a Milestone system that’s compatible with ONVIF Bridge
2) The Police department can connect to ONVIF Cameras

With those two things in place, the police department could use your cameras to help with situational awareness and help solve crimes.

In our lab at Kenton Brothers, we were able to successfully connect the Milestone ONVIF Bridge to Avigilon and Genetec systems.

If you would like to know more about how to connect your cameras to your local police department, give us a call!