CCTV security news. Financial report on security companies

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CCTV the state of the industry

Plimsoll analysis have recently produced an interesting report on the financial health of the CCTV and security industry. They carried out an in depth study of 391 leading UK security firms and found that the majority of companies are coming under increasing threat of failure. Their study found that of the 391 companies only 159 were in a good or strong position, a somewhat frightening statistic if you are a CCTV security installer today.

Fierce competition.

The reasons however are clear , fierce competition has driven prices and margins down leaving profits hard to find. Logistics often means cutting engineers is difficult without seriously compromising service levels and those who have tried have and found it impossible to reach industry standards for service and response times and as a result have inevitably lost customers. It is estimated that of the 359 companies included in the survey as many as 33% are actually making a loss and are in danger of takeover or complete failure.

Solving the problem.

So how can this be addressed? well to be brutal some companies deserve to fail. Installing at a loss, as loss leader in the hope that service incomes will make profits in the end are short sited and simply drive good businesses to the wall . Some of the big boys have been guilty of this during this recession.

Cuts.

Most of the of the more clever players however have simply cut away the excess, driven down stock levels and hung on in there by the seat of their pants. Slowly but surely the CCTV security industry is emerging from the economic downturn, ready to take on the IPCCTV revolution and get back to see strong balance sheets by early 2011.

Dual path IP monitoring

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Dual path IP monitoring.

It is clear to see the benefits that a dual path monitoring system can
bring to any security system. Peace of mind for the customer and
almost always a prerequisite of the insurance company, it is obvious
two paths are better one.

Line cuts.

In the not too dim and distant past single path monitored phone
connections were all too common. On many occasions an engineer would
turn up after a break-in only to find that all the incoming lines had
been cut often at the top of the telegraph pole. The perpetrators
would then have simply disabled the bell box and helped themselves.
The central station, Police and the customer, none the wiser!

Insurance.

Insurance companies soon wised up to this and driven by the need for a
solution, products were developed using mobile phone technology to
send a secondary signal out via the mobile network to the waiting
central station. The dual path monitoring solution was born and has
been an unqualified success ever since its inception.

IP broadband monitoring.

Legacy signalling providers obviously designed their services around the old PSTN infrastructure. One company however thought beyond this legacy infrastructure and planned their product around what was
inevitably to become the future. The future is Broadband and the
future is fibre.

Emizon lead way!

Emizon have designed their service to support installers take advantage of the IP environment including fibre and next generation networks. As a result they are leading the way in cost effective, secure dual path signalling and Emizon IP is now being specified as
standard by many installers. The benefits include on line access to enable a remote maintenance and remote programming which is enabled via a serial port integrated into the TDC. Installers can use this service to make changes to channel inputs and check the signal strength remotely.  In addition, using an on-board set of relays, DVRs can be given a
reboot often all they need, saving engineer time on a site visit.  And as an IP service integration with other building services is also that much easier to achieve.

Secure IP monitoring over broadband.

However most importantly Emizon has been specifically designed for the
broadband era and is secure and easy to use as a result. No unexpected phone
bills either to explain away. But how does it compare price wise to
other products? Well very favourably. Central stations have seen the
future and keen pricing will encourage installations. The unit is not
site specific so engineers can carry the TDC in their car and fit a
unit on the day whatever the signalling grade required, panel or GPRS network is available and with either dynamic or static IP addressing. With pstn connectivity being added later this summer and meaning that the same Emizon TCD can be deployed whatever the engineer is faced with on site. Simple.

No other way forward.

When we look to the future it is hard to see that fibre and broadband
are going to be superceded by a new technology soon. So with Emizon
exploiting broadband so cleverly, it hard to see a dual path
signalling product that is really capable of matching the benefits
Emizon can provide.

Biometric finger print reader

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Biometric fingerprint readers.

Biometric finger print readers are undoubtedly the future of access control. The traditional methods of access control solutions uses either fobs , proximity cards or key codes. All of these suffer from one basic floor, they are all easily compromised.

Security floor.

Quite simply , a code can be told to anyone , a card and fob passed to a friend or colleague. Of course its not always that easy as access control software does have some basic security functions to recognise misuse. However, ultimately once this is discovered the system has already been compromised and quite simply this is not acceptable .

Total security.

So how does the biometric fingerprint reader protect against this. Well we  all have a unique fingerprint , this cannot be replicated, so the person presenting their fingerprint data is the person who is genuinely allowed through the door.

Why use anything else?

Why have businesses not adopted this means of entry before then? Well they have tried , but  biometric readers are to say the least unreliable, dirt, dust and rain all affect the quality of of the data being read from the fingerprint and to be fair they are very slow. Fingerprint data takes a lot of processing power to ensure it is correct and standing outside a door for 3 or four seconds may not seem a long time but on well used doors it is untenable

Integrated access control solution.

So has anything changed? Well yes, companies know it is the way forward and in the last couple of years big steps have been taken to improve the technology.  iEVO are one such company that has now produced a full proof solution. By integrating their technology with partner companies such as Paxton we see a fast, full proof solution.

They actually save money!

large organisations that get through numerous employees and vast numbers of cards will see huge savings by migrating to biometric solutions. It will not be long before these fingerprint readers are common place and we will all soon get used to fast effective entry solution. Best of all, we carry the key on our own person.

Seagate or Western digital

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Seagate  or Western digital.

Hard drives! Anyone in the IPCCTV world will tell you these are the only two hard drives that are really used in most digital recorders today. They will also tell you that both are the same , there is no difference, it does not matter which one you use. This is especially true of installers who buy their DVR’s from the manufacturers and install their own hard drives .This can save a lot of money. Most manufacturers will advise against this but all in the know realize that on paper it makes little difference.

But……….

However we have come across a case where it seems some DVR’s really do need the hard drive installed that the product has been tested on. Below we carried out a series of test on a DVR that seemed to fail for no apparent reason the results were surprising and indeed could shed some light onto why DVR’s seem to fail for no apparent reason.

The test.

Below is the findings as described by the technician who carried out the testing…………………….

“I have been undertaking an extensive test on the DVR to emulate some of the issues we are seeing reported in the field”………..

The issues we were hearing were:-

  • Alarms locking up the units
  • Rebooting
  • HDD / recordings missing

I have set up a unit and  over the last 2 weeks, here are the results of my tests:-

Seagate 1Tb ST31000525SV – 2 of them to make 2Tb –  DVR 400ips unit

  • 5 cameras connected (1 camera looped to 4 other inputs)
  • CCTV Camera 1 is set up for motion and also I have turned on Sensor 1 and set to N/O – basically causing the alarm to be permanently on
  • Cameras 2-5 are set for motion
  • Recording schedule set for motion and continuous 24/7
  • Notify set to send alarm data to an internal IP address………….my laptop,……….so not always there (testing to see if a non-connection will cause lockup)

After 1-2 days of me not being present, the unit shows the ‘no HDD’ symbol with a red cross through the symbol………..looking at the System info, no HDD’s are present………reboot and they still do not appear……..when I do a full power recycle, both HDD’s appear again, the system continues recording and all video recording is still present (up to the point where the HDDs disappeared obviously)

last week, I observed the unit reboot after 3 hours, and when I checked the System info, one of the HDDs had disappeared……..a couple of hours later, both HDDs had gone after another reboot

So, I had taken delivery of 2 x Western Digital 1Tb HDDs Caviar AV 10EVDS and proceeded to put those into the  DVR in question

It is now Wednesday (5days later) and the exact same test has been performed with no reboot, lockup or HDD / Video recording loss……………….this leads me to suspect the following:-

  • The Seagate drives we were using were a faulty batch (possible but unlikely)
  • The Seagate drives we were using are actually not fully compatible with the DVR firmware, even though the manufacturer gave us the part number (possible)
  • The Seagate drives were not correctly inserted  by the client and my changing the drives to another unit is purely coincidental and corrected the fault – again  unlikely

Conclusion , it would seem that there is some subtle difference between the hard drives that has caused the DVR to crash although in practice this is not really possible the testing proves that somewhere within the firmware of the DVR a problem has occurred with the original hard drives.

When we at integrated CCTV asked the engineer if he thought there was a difference between the hard drives he replied.

“No same spec should make no difference, hard to understand, the Seagate is a good make so its not the Hard drive just the way it works with the DVR”

Feedback.

Has anyone else experienced hard drive failures on your own DVRs that may in fact be caused by a similar problem? If so we welcome your thoughts and feedback.

VCL dome repair solution

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VCL dome repairs.

VCL were a company who were one of the great success stories of the late nineties and early part of this century. They were a British organisation who revolutionised the CCTV market with their orbital domes.

Takeover

Their success was soon recognised and take over was inevitable. First Ademco then Honeywell also profited from the success of the dome through aggressive take-overs. Buy dome spares

Honeywell.

Honeywell however have fingers in many pies and the orb 6 and orb gold dome was eventually superseded with Honeywell’s own product lines, no surprise but a great shame. One thing however has over the last couple of years though has been neglected and that’s repairs of the domes themselves! The CCTV domes won’t last forever. They have moving parts and are of course vulnerable to wear and tear. Some large repair houses will take on refurbishments but Honeywell no longer support the product.

VCL orb gold camera

It is here that a great opportunity exists for companies willing to help out the tens of thousands of end users out there that still have VCL domes and still need them as part of their overall security package. 360 vision technology are one company that we have sourced that has cleverly taken advantage of what is going to be a very large market as the VCL domes reach the end of their life cycle.

The 360 dome inner

The 360 vision dome inner can be adapted to fit into the existing orb gold housing. This dramatically reduces the cost of an upgrade and often works out cheaper than actually trying to repair the old dome inner itself. The outer housings of the VCL dome are brilliantly robust and will go on working for years without needing any attention at all, so the smart businesses out there might find a cost effective solution with 360 vision technology.

Repair it!

Servicing a VCL dome can also be carried out by Maxey Moverley. This is a repair house that has  skilled staff to look after the inevitable rise in demand to fix what after all is a very good product, many years after its original conception.