Internet CCTV boosted by Faster Broadband Speeds
Monday, December 15th, 2008
Internet CCTV is in great demand, CCTV system owners want remote access to their security cameras.
Virgin’s announcement today of their new 50Mbps internet service to the home marks a milestone in the development of internet connectivity and speed.
People want to be able to monitor:
- CCTV at their office from home
- their holiday home CCTV from anywhere
- their home CCTV when away
- CCTV at multiple business sites
- In fact CCTV any place from anywhere
- And then, check their CCTV from their iPhone, Blackberry, Windows mobile ….
In the early days of the internet we all used dial-up telephone internet connections with a connection speed of 56 kbps (kilobits per second).
In those days you may recall that a picture on a web page used to build in a series of horizontal stripes as the image data was downloaded to your PC from the website’s server. To build a single static picture might have taken several seconds …
When ‘Broadband’ first became available our download speed typically increased ten-fold to 512kbps.
Before too much longer 2Mbps (Mega bits per second) was common place.
Followed by offers of 8, 10, 17 & 20 Mbps …
Virgin have a pre-existing fibre-optic network to street cabinets which enables them to provide this class-leading speed. From their site:
There are now two main types of broadband. One uses copper phone wire; one uses fibre optics. One was invented in the 1870s for phone calls; one was designed for the Internet. One is struggling to keep up with the growth of the web… the other is from Virgin Media.
There is only one fibre optic network. It’s the Mother of all Broadband.
BT will not be out-performed and they have their own plans in-hand to install fibre networks that will allow them to catch up with Virgin’s offer.
The main driver for the demand in increased internet speed performance is the number of home PC users who are now using their internet connections to stream video from services such as the BBC’s iPlayer - their phenomenally successful service which allows you a second chance to see your favourite TV programmes online.
BT, ITV and the BBC are teaming-up to offer some competition to Virgin.
IP Video needs a fast internet connection to stream video smoothly, and to get the data onto your PC before your player runs out of playback data.
The Virgin offer is potentially available to 12.6 million UK homes, and Virgin are aiming to complete their upgrade rollout by Summer 2009.
The service is still asymmetric, that’s to say it has a faster download speed than upload. It’s important to bear this in mind for remote CCTV applications - as your CCTV system is effectively serving images ‘up’ to the internet it is the upload speed which is the bottleneck. With this new 50Mbps service Virgin have increased the maximum upload speed to a class-leading 1.5Mbps which will prove a real benefit if you can get (afford?) this service at your CCTV site.
This competition for ever faster broadband connection speeds is great news for internet CCTV - it is essentially the same thing - video over the internet OR IP Video (IP = Internet Protocol).
As internet speeds increase, and performance improves, connecting to remote devices (anywhere in the world) will simply become a given.
A fast internet will allow the World to become one large network, and you will be able to use-IP to connect to any media, place, device or service.
