Axis installation for surveillance of UK schools wins security award

SCS Distribution, the sole distributor in southern Africa for Axis Communications, today announced that Newport City Council has won the 2002 Security Client of the year award at the annual Security Excellence Awards in London.

Newport City Council beat several high profile nominees such as HSBC and National Heritage with its groundbreaking, network-based CCTV solution for securing 20 primary schools in the Newport area. This is the first time an IP-based solution has won this prestigious award.

The Newport Community Safety Partnership initiative, which combined the City Council, Gwent Police and Axis Communications, put together a fully networked surveillance solution. It enabled surveillance of hot spots such as school roofs and buildings during after-hours. AXIS 2400 Video Servers were deployed to distribute video images from CCTV cameras onto the network. The entire solution enabled alarm activation and relaying of video footage via e-surveillance software, which was supplied by Farsight, an Axis Application Developer partner (ADP), to a central monitoring centre in the council`s civic centre on a 24-hour basis.

"By taking advantage of the National Grid for Learning and IP-Surveillance technology, this project has delivered true benefits to the primary schools in the Newport area," commented Phil Cox, principal consultant at Newport City Council. "We are delighted to have won this award and hope that other councils follow our example."

The government`s National Grid for Learning initiative meant that fixed network lines were linked into the schools with a capacity of between 256KB up to 2MB. As these were only being used during school hours, the IP-Surveillance solution utilised the excess bandwidth capacity during out-of-school hours to provide the network at no extra cost.