Camera Connectivity, or Ramen for extending your camera coverage

Camera Connectivity, or Ramen for extending your camera coverage University of Michigan at Flint uses Ramen’s Wireless Networking Service to extend their surveillance camera coverage.

University of Michigan at Flint is of the three campuses of the University of Michigan system, a large public university system. The university has a 76-acre urban campus where the Department of Public Safety (DPS) provides complete law enforcement services to the campus. U-Mich Flint’s DPS was the first police department in the state to be accredited by the Michigan Law Enforcement Accreditation Commission. DPS takes campus safety very seriously and proceeded with a program to implement video surveillance. The program was a success but expansion of the surveillance system to cover parking lots using Ethernet-connected cameras proved to be challenging.  By partnering with Ramen, they were able bring the costs down to where could get budget approval.

Executive Summary‍

The DPS at University of Michigan-Flint was looking extend video surveillance to several large parking lots in the northern section of the campus. Getting adequate video coverage of the lots would require mounting cameras on light posts on the parking lot. The trenching costs required to get fiber to these posts made the project unaffordable. The IT department partnered with Ramen to use wireless to connect cameras. The distance from the furthest desired camera location to the nearest building was ~1000ft and had a few trees in the path. Ramen chose to deploy private LTE to enable a reliable link. The cellular infrastructure was deployed on the rooftop of the William S. White building and enabled the installation of multiple cameras over the parking lot. Another option considered was use of a public LTE network however this would have limited the total data transfer per month. The Ramen solution reduced costs by 80% and shortened the deployment time to 3 months. The DPS team plans to deploy additional cameras and incremental cost per camera comes out to less than $500 in hardware costs for the connectivity with no restrictions on total data transfer.

Highlights

The Ramen infrastructure utilized just three radios mounted on the roof top of the William S. White building to provide connectivity coverage to an area close to 2 million sq ft.

Ramen also provided adaptors that convert an LTE radio link to Ethernet so any Ethernet enabled camera can be connected.

By offering the network as a service, Ramen eliminated the need for the customer to hire additional staff or develop in-house expertise to deploy private LTE. Additionally, the customer was able to continue with their preferred brand of cameras and their existing VMS system.

Challenge

The customer desired to extend their video surveillance system to cover certain parking lots however the cost of trenching to get Ethernet connections to the lamp posts on the parking lots was over $10,000 per camera and would make the project economically unfeasible.

The proposed project was estimated to take 9–12 months to complete and would cost over a million dollars.

Solution

In this deployment, Ramen implemented an LTE network operating in the CBRS band, with the LTE core running on two redundant Ramen Edge boxes. A cloud connection to the Ramen Cloud Management system facilitates remote network monitoring and enables seamless software upgrades. The Ramen solution enabled the customer to use cameras of their choice with their existing VMS system.  For additional cameras at other locations on campus, we expect to deploy additional LTE systems and some mm-wave system.
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Impact‍

By partnering with Ramen, the customer was able to get a solution that avoided the large capital expense of trenching and enabled the DPS team to deploy cameras exactly where they wanted. Ramen’s intelligent video codec configuration optimization allow connection of double the number of cameras supported by other solutions that can operate in the same spectrum.