How high speed cellular connectivity is changing the game in video surveillance

Wireless connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), and the cloud are transforming video surveillance as we know it. With a new generation of surveillance cameras that connect wirelessly to the cloud, deploying, managing, and leveraging video surveillance systems has become cheaper, easier to use, more secure, and more efficient. Designed for network connectivity, these digital IP cameras outperform analog CCTV cameras on a number of metrics, from image resolution and digital zoom to simplified management of stored video footage.

As these improvements open to ever-more use cases that leverage surveillance cameras, it’s no wonder that growth projections for the already multi-billion dollar market are staggering, from over US$ 17.6 billion in 2018 to US$ 32.6 billion in 2023. In urban environments, video surveillance has often become synonymous with enhancing public safety. In businesses around the world, surveillance cameras are being used to enable access control systems. Construction companies are deploying them to monitor operations and enhance worker safety. Industries use them to monitor processes, as well as security. And households are relying on them to verify domestic security alarms.

A mobile video surveillance hub

Over the past year, we have been showcasing an implementation of a mobile video surveillance station at industry trade shows. The setup can channel images from up to twelve IP surveillance cameras that are connected via Ethernet or Wi‑Fi to a cellular gateway. From the gateway, the video streams are transferred to the cloud via 4G LTE using our u-blox Toby-L4 LTE Cat 6 cellular modem, which achieves high data throughput using carrier aggregation. Once on the cloud, the video is hosted and processed on a video management system, a video surveillance as a service (VSaaS) platform, or, depending on the application, an AI server. End-users can remotely monitor the images from their connected devices and control cameras settings such as tilt and zoom, image resolution, and frames per second.

Among the most obvious advantages of such nomadic solutions is portability. Because the entire setup can be fully wireless, launching a surveillance operation is reduced to mounting the cameras and the gateway and ensuring that the devices successfully connect to each other. In addition to simplifying video surveillance to increase public safety at events such as the upcoming Olympic Games in Japan, this tremendously simplifies rapid deployments on crime scenes, at mass demonstrations, or in emergency settings such as natural catastrophes in which access is impeded by people or the elements.

Cost and ease-of-use are also arguments in their favor. In exchange for a predictable service fee, cloud-based services such as VSaaS cut upfront cost and specialized manpower needed to deploy a network of surveillance cameras by handling file storage, server maintenance, cybersecurity, and hardware renewal for the end-users. Because they run on a much larger infrastructure than self-hosted systems, scaling up surveillance networks is as simple as adding more cameras to the system. The remaining updates required at the backend are handled seamlessly on the cloud.

u-blox Toby-L4 – plenty of horsepower for demanding deployments

To find out why the u-blox Toby-L4 LTE Cat 6 module is the perfect choice for your multi IP surveillance camera gateway, please contact your nearest sales rep or fill out a project information form.