With a combined area of over 300 acres, the three vast ACS International School campuses in Cobham, Hillingdon and Egham enrol a total of 2,400 students offering both day and boarding education. The students come from over 70 countries, predominantly the USA.

Given the high profile nature of the school, security is a key concern. In upgrading the small paging system in place, it turned to Staines-based installers SDD Sound and Light to provide a campus-wide system, which could be linked together to provide pre-recorded announcement and other advanced security features across the three sites.

SDD Sound and Light chose Bosch Praesideo, the world's first fully digital public address and emergency sound system, because unlike traditional PA systems, which connect all elements to a central controller, Praesideo uses a network configuration, thus offering outstanding flexibility in terms of zone assignments and numbers, call stations, audio inputs and outputs. Working in the digital domain brings unparalleled functionality, excellent sound quality and virtually limitless possibilities since system elements can be connected to practically any point.

At each of the ACS International Schools sites, engineers split the campus into different paging zones, enabling individual control access across the zones to target specific areas. The largest campus, Cobham, was split into some 70 zones ensuring that emergency/PA messages can be sent out to individual or multiple zones as required. Fibre optic cabling links the buildings, thus ensuring signal integrity and allowing for considerable distances to be covered. In addition, the systems are linked over the internet enabling pre-recorded announcements to be sent out simultaneously across the campuses, and allowing for the entire system to be monitored both in-house and remotely at the SDD offices.

"This is the most complex installation of the Bosch Praesideo system in the UK to date. It took a team of eight SDD engineers six months to complete, using all of the expertise of our IT engineers to successfully link the three systems together over the internet" says Nigel Clark, operations manager at SDD Sound and Light.

"At each campus, fibre optic connections link the buildings. The project required an extraordinary total of 30km of fibre optic cables and 20km of copper cabling for speakers. The system is so advanced that if, for example, a microphone is accidentally unplugged, an alert is transmitted over the Internet to the SDD offices" Nigel continues.

"The Bosch products have allowed us greater precision and control by using fibre optics for the distribution of audio signals where we would ordinarily have used copper or radio link. Coupled with real-time remote monitoring of the system," concludes Nigel, "Bosch technology has enabled us to satisfy client requirements and stay within budgets"

"There is increasing demand for fully integrated digital systems to operate in all situations. As the world's first fully digital public address and emergency sound system, the Bosch Praesideo offers a range of audio installation products that deliver everything neatly in one package. The concept has been around for several years, but now Bosch is pioneering the most advanced technology to make this a truly workable solution" adds Jeremy Hockham, managing director of Bosch security systems.