Like all Police forces, the Iranian Police - the NAJA, strive for the maximum accessibility and accountability in their operations in order to maintain public confidence and support, and are constantly striving to make improvements to further this aim. As an important part of this policy of accessibility, a system requirement was prepared for an extremely advanced CCTV concept - placing CCTV colour cameras in each police station, and linking all the cameras over a city wide network across Teheran into a central control room, giving both central and local viewing of the images. The communications technology combines the existing police cable WAN, wireless networks and microwave, using IP (Internet Protocol) transmission.
The contract was awarded to the Teheran-based company Rah Roshd, who could provide the winning combination of excellent implementation skills, plus Vista brand products, for which they are the local distributor.
At the heart of the solution is Vista's SmartTel system that feeds images to remote PCs over an IP network. With the capability to send live video pictures over any of the common communications networks - PSTN, LAN, WAN, ISDN, or GSM - Vista SmartTel, together with the professional ability of Rah Roshd, proved to be one of the key factors behind the Vista solution being selected.
Each police station has a number of CCTV cameras - 6 or more - maintaining surveillance of the required areas. The cameras installed are Vista VPC9130 High Resolution Colour and Vista VPM8130 High Resolution Monochrome cameras. The cameras all link together and feed the signal to a PC running Vista SmartTel Windows software, including Vista VLSLA and VLSTR units, which provides a console to control local viewing as required, and is the device that gives the system its wide area communications capability. In addition to the Police Stations, there are also four larger traffic control centres included in the network.
Mark Pritchard, Divisional Director of Vista, says:
"Vista's SmartTel can link to almost any communications network - PSTN, LAN/WAN, ISDN, or GSM - for sending images to remote sites. In this case the selected options - the existing cable WAN that NAJA was already using, and where there were gaps in the network, new wireless and microwave communications - gave a highly cost-effective solution to the problem of covering communications across a very large city of 12 million people with minimum expenditure and effort. The microwave and radio links were particularly effective in reducing an otherwise heavy communications cost for those stations that were not already on the network - the alternative of new cabling would have been prohibitive in Teheran's busy metropolis".
"This installation demonstrates the high quality of Vista products, its performance in an IP-based environment and our strength in export markets."
The centre of the system is based at the Police HQ, using the Control Room that houses Teheran's 110 Centre - the public telephone emergency system that is already a communications hub for the NAJA. The control room receives all image streams from the Police stations, and uses SmartTel to manage the incoming feeds, viewing live pictures in full, quad or 10 camera views. The system offers audio notification of any alarm situations, archives all received pictures to hard disk and provides an audit trail as required.
Many of the Police station walls through which cables were being run are over a metre thick, and the implementation plan allowed a very tight timescale of only one day per station. However, despite the considerable physical problems set by the many old buildings, the outcome was an elapsed time from goods clearing customs to system completion of merely 40 days.
Once bedded-in, the nationwide implementation of the network will begin with a second phase that will cover the rest of the Police stations in Iran outside Teheran - a further 50, to be installed across a country that is three times the size of Great Britain.