Sandwell’s Greets Green Partnership worked with local security consultants Cogent, to solve the problem of covering the Albion Business Area with CCTV and building a control room to manage and monitor it all from.The initial design was put together and publicly tendered; winning the bid was installer Custom Technology Solutions from Halesowen, experienced systems integrators in both wireless networking technology and CCTV.

The installation was delivered with its ‘total project delivery’ package from Custom Technology and completed early in 2007. Andy Marston, of Custom Technology states, “the solution is somewhat un-conventional, but it showed our experience, technical knowledge and ability to deliver the best value solution based on the customers requirements, we were able to pre-test and evaluate all the equipment using our specialist high access lifting equipment to conduct a proof or concept before any work was undertaken.”

The Albion Business District of West Bromwich now has a state of the art wireless CCTV system covering several square miles of their business district recording every camera 24hrs of every day. The system comprises of high speed dome cameras and fixed automatic number plate recognition cameras recording every number plate of every vehicle entering and leaving the business estates area. Linking it all to the centrally managed digital recording system is the latest in wireless network technology. The images and camera control is totally seamless from the control room, and the operator would not know if it was hard wired or not, or if the camera was outside their control room or 2 miles away.

The real benefit to the Albion Business area is the significant coverage that was achieved and the project being delivered well within budget. The local Police will have remote access to the system and will be able to interrogate the ANPR number pate database against the PNC to check for stolen or suspicious vehicles in and around the area.The work involved close liaison with Sandwell Council, and E-On for the replacement of street lighting columns and fitting of new ones that integrated street lighting with CCTV and wireless transmission columns. Specially designed columns are now fitted around the Albion Business Area with CCTV cameras offering pin-point accuracy over every movement on the estate. Data Protection and image blanking around the residential areas was another factor that had to be built in to the system, compliant signage is provided by Custom Technology to support the scheme.

Wire Free CCTV Column