IP Hits the Middle East

North London-based IP consultant UBIQZ has assisted a local installer with a £250,000 Internet-addressable camera surveillance project in Tripoli, Libya.

Forty Sony cameras have been installed over 11 floors of a finance tower block in a project that is one of the first instances of a Middle East building adopting IP on a significant scale.

The location is the Dat el-Emad complex in the heart of Tripoli's financial district and near the site of the old city.  As with other installations, UBIQZ worked with the existing security installer, seamlessly helping them with an IP solution and allowing them to take the lead in terms of client communication.

Since the tower was brand new, suitable structured cabling was already laid out for IT.  Libyan engineers installed the units while UBIQX oversaw the operation and offered advice as necessary.

The cameras are monitoring both workers and customers as they enter and leave the building as well as ATM areas, foreign exchange desks and an underground treasury section.

Staff at a manned control room look for clear-cut incidents or unusual patterns of behaviour. Using the cameras' embedded intelligence, abnormal scenes can be searched for retrospectively.  Sony's RealShot Manager software handles aspects including mapping, scheduling and layout, with the client benefiting from schematic diagrams of camera layouts on each floor.

The Libyan project underlines that UBIQZ is able to help users configure and understand the subtleties of the cameras on their networks as well as providing system architecture.

UBIQZ's other recent projects include two UK health care sites, a faith school in Bromley, Kent, and a network of central London car parks.  Almost alone among security consultants, UBIQZ specialises in pure IP-addressable solutions and systems where analogue and IP components are integrated