CCTV Installed At Clarence Court Hotel
In order to provide better security for guests and the hotel as a whole, The Clarence Court hotel commissioned Cheltenham Computer Specialists to install some of the lastest CCTV cameras available on the market.
7 internal CCTV cameras with High Definition wide angle lenses, motion detection and night vision were installed to cover strategic points around the hotel. Placing the cameras was made easy because the power for the cameras is sent down the same cable as the data. This allowed for easy positioning of the cameras and did not restrict the cameras to locations where there was a power supply.
All the CCTV camera cables were fed back to the rack cabinet into which was installed a PoE (Power Over Ethernet) auto-sensing switch. Each cable was connected to one of the ports and power was then distributed to each camera.
Each camera can be manually adjusted to suit the coverage needed. The lens can be rotated 180 degrees and up and down by roughly 40 degrees but the wide angle of each lens means even small offices can be well covered.
The cameras were then named and added to a software package which was installed on one of the office's Windows PCs. It was from the software "Control Panel" that we set up when the recording would take place.
The options for recording were: Continuously, on Motion Detection or by a schedule. Motion detection also allowed for "hot spots" to be configured. Hot Spots allow for an room to be covered by the cameras but only start recording if someone breaks in through the window. Therefore, you mark the window as a "hot spot" and the camera ignores people walking around the rest of the room. It's a very simple and effective system.
Rather than clog up the office PC with large amounts of recordings, we attached a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device and from within the Control Panel we pointed all the recordings to the NAS freeing up the Office PC to act as just the controller.
The next step was to provide the owners remote access to the cameras and recordings. This allowed them to view the cameras in "real time" via a mobile phone, iPad or through a web browser from any location where they had Internet access or 3g / 4g coverage.
The Cheltenham based hotel is now covered by CCTV operating 24 / 7 and with the ability to look back at recordings for a given period of time.
