The Queensgate site has seen investment of £100 million on infrastructure and resources over the past 10 years and Castel worked with installer Kenyon Access Consultants to enable university staff to communicate effectively with visitors before allowing them entry.

When they arrive at barriers, gates or bollards on the campus, drivers contact security officers using Castel's Xellip one or two call button full IP/SIP entry stations. These are compliant with the Equality Act. The stations have a 316-grade stainless steel vandal-proof faceplate and are IP64-rated to withstand the elements or rain/water ingress.

For certain locations, Castel created a modified housing on posts to meet specific mounting requirements. Crucially, these units are power over Ethernet (PoE), which meant that installers and site managers were able to use the existing twisted pair cabling to connect the entry stations to the IP network. (An optional external power supply is also available.)

The built-in colour camera uses H.264 compression technology and sound quality is enhanced by noise and echo-cancelling. There are three LEDs on the front panel and an integrated induction loop to comply with disability regulations. Some of the entry stations on the campus have been fitted with a 125 kHz Mifare proximity reader so that staff and third parties can gain entry for their vehicles automatically.

Atmane Bensghir is Business Development Manager at Castel. He said: "The university is using the entry stations in several non-standard ways. We helped the installer to place duplicate panels at different heights on the same post to maximise convenience, both for drivers of regular cars and for drivers sitting higher up in the cab of a commercial vehicle. Another unusual feature in the project is the use of our panels to lower retractable bollards."

The university aims to achieve the widest possible exchange of information and the security team wanted IP intercom that would interact seamlessly with management systems on an open platform. With their popular codecs, the Castel IP intercoms will contribute to the centralisation of video and audio feeds in the future as the campus security team uses Milestone video management and Xprotect software to aggregate and analyse data streams.