Virgin Media are reducing the price of their 50Mbps service to just £28 per month from September 1st (if you also take a Virgin phone line).

This price/performance milestone is a significant step along the road to one big happy high performance inter-network.

As IP camera specialists we can see – “Any picture, from any place, and any time …” – and these performance boosts continue to make it an improving experience!

Virgin have also announced trials of 10Mbps uplinks – bearing in mind that it is the uplink speed of your camera (out there somewhere on the internet) that is often the performance limiting factor, then this too bodes well for future performance.

They have also begun trials of 200Mbps internet download speeds!

Not so long ago, in a land consisting of many peer-to-peer networks, 10Mbps was the fastest that you could connect to a machine six feet away …

Virgin claims that at 50Mbps you’ll be able to download a music track in just one second!

PC Pro announce Virgin 50Mbps price drop.

Think Broadband announce Virgin 50Mbps price drop.

Virgin’s 50Meg offer.

PC Pro on Virgin’s 200Mbps trials.

You need to wait just two more weeks …

Unless anybody can tell us all where to sign up sooner?

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The IP Expo exhibition in October might be interesting:

IP Expo now incorporates four great events: IP’09 (focusing on infrastructure & convergence), VM’09 (exploring virtualisation), and (new for 2009) Wireless ‘09 & Cloud’09 – The UK’s first independent cloud computing event, providing insiprational thinking plus practical solutions for your organisation

It aims to cover four key areas:

• The convergence of voice, data and video over IP Networks
  • Network Optimisation, Security and Business Continuity, Communications & Collaboration and Datacentre Management.
• Virtualisation
  • From servers to storage, data centres to desktops…Unleash the Power of Virtualisation in your Business!
• Cloud Computing
  • Whether building applications in the cloud or integrating cloud services with legacy systems
• Wireless
  • Define, develop and deploy the right mobility and wireless solution

Visit their website to learn more and register – IP Expo 09

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JVSG, the Joint Video Surveillance Group, have developed a great software tool which helps you to calculate the bandwidth needed for network CCTV cameras.

This is one of the major concerns expressed (typically by IT Managers) when people suggest adding video cameras to their network.

The software can calculate the bandwidth requirements for cameras with all the common resolution specifications and allows you to calculate the effects of varying resolution, frame rates, numbers of cameras, the video compression standard (H.264, MPEG4, MJPEG) etc.

You can even estimate the impact of varying amounts of motion activity in the scene.

See below for more information on the settable parameters, or click the image above to visit their website.

You can download and run a FREE 45-day evaluation copy of this software from their website, and if you decide to buy it’s just £39 to licence the software for continued use.

• Resolution – Camera resolution in pixels. You can select resolution from the drop-down list. The list contains most popular PAL and NTSC camera resolutions (like 352×288 CIF PAL, 704×576 4 CIF PAL) as well as some typical network cameras resolutions (like 640×480) including megapixel resolutions (1280×1024, 1600×1200), HD and full HD resolutions (1920×1080) as well as others.
• Compression – Video compression. You can choose from MPEG4, H.264, four levels of Motion JPEG (MJPG) compression (from Low to High) and “RAW Data”. If you use Motion JPEG you can use different JPEG compression levels. If you use low MJPEG compression (level 10) you get best quality of picture and about 10 times lower frame size. If you use Medium MJPEG compression (level 20) you usually obtain a good picture quality and an optimal Quality/Frame Size ratio. With a JPEG level of more than 50 your picture becomes bad for video surveillance purpose.
• FPS – Frames Per Second. Typical FPS for video surveillance system is from 5 to 15 frames per second. In some applications (like CCTV in casino) it is required to use higher speed values (25-60 FPS). Alternative name for FPS is IPS (Images Per Second).
• Days – Required length of video archive in days (24 hours). Used for storage space calculation.
• Cameras – Number of cameras in your CCTV installation with the same parameters.
• Recording % – Estimated motion recording activity. 100% for constant recording. This parameter is used to calculate disk storage space in case the video is recorded on a schedule or on a motion detector.
• Image Complexity – Frames from some CCTV cameras are more detailed and have a higher frame size.
• Motion % – Motion activity (100% for constant activity). This parameter is used for MPEG4 and H.264 bandwidth estimation.

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The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) opens tomorrow in Las Vegas.

It’s the annual show where all the big boys showcase their new toys.

Take a look at this early news of a new wireless N router from D-Link featured over at engadget.

This router is the ideal solution for the consumer who wants to be the first on his or her block with the ultimate ‘all-in-one’ networking device.

Says Daniel Kelley, senior director of marketing for D-Link Systems.

Of course, it is a state-of-the-art wireless N router, but take note of the ‘STORAGE ROUTER’ badge – it allows you to connect and share USB hard drives as if they were network attached storage (NAS).

Some network cameras, such as Mobotix, are already able to store their surveillance video to network attached storage directly (without the need for any PC or server to be running video recording software) – ideal for those who would rather not run a PC 24/7 for surveillance at their home, office, holiday home, etc.

There’s a wide selection of NAS drives available, but what makes this router option attractive is that standard USB external hard drives are a good deal cheaper than NAS drives, and this router will make a USB drive behave like an NAS drive.

The CES show opens tomorrow.

engadget have a great micro site featuring all the latest CES News – worth a visit for any Tech Geek!!

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IPCCTV delivers real advantages over its predecessor analogue CCTV; as we have mentioned many times before, analogue CCTV cameras hit a technology glass ceiling of 0.4 megapixel image resolution; IP has already enabled the connective medium that allows CCTV cameras to deliver 16 megapixel images.

There’s some interesting blog dialogue flaring-up in the VOIP world which hypothesises that VOIP is dead – 2008: The Year That VOIP Died

Of course they are not really reporting the end of the use of VOIP, quite the opposite in fact – the use of IP networks for voice telephony has become merely plumbing.

There is no killer benefit to VOIP.

Ordinary telecoms costs are cheap enough.

VOIP has become fairly mainstream and boring, and therefore barely worth further discussion.

There’s some talk of High Definition telephony (HD VOIP) bringing a renaissance, but who ever finished a phone conversation and thought I really must upgrade this handset to the latest Bose unit so that my chums sound better!?!?!?

As you read the blogs from these VOIP gurus you have to wonder at the similarities, and might VOIP be a predictor of the future of IP CCTV:

• VOIP was special
• VOIP was the future
• Dedicated exhibitions and conferences were created
• Some manufacturers didn’t get it
• Some mainstream manufacturers broadened their hardware product range
• Some focused on the software
• Maybe there were more providers than there was demand?
• Pure play companies are struggling
• Some companies fell by the wayside

This summary – 10 points about the death of VOIP – gives a neat overview.

Another interesting article introduces the Internet Communications Continuum – I’ve never heard it called this before, but it is this thing, this continually evolving connectivity of the cloud that is the vital wave to ride!

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