Brunswick House is a large student accommodation complex on Newmarket Road in Cambridge. Being a short walk from both universities in Cambridge it is a very popular choice and houses hundreds of students each year.
The building was constructed in 2011 with an analog CCTV system covering all external and common areas. This system however, did not age well. Multiple cameras went offline frequently and the image quality was very poor across the board.
Photuris took over the maintenance contract at this site in February 2023 thanks to our close relationship with Derwent FM, a large facilities management company that also runs student accommodation.
Immediately the staff and management at Brunswick House were extremely impressed with the level of service they received from Photuris, with many issues that had been ongoing for years being rectified within weeks of us taking over.
Due to this level of service, when chosing a contractor to carry out a full upgrade of their CCTV system. Brunswick House came to Photuris immediately, and we prepared an in-depth quotation including to add 2 additional cameras to cover blind spots in the existing system.
We then upgraded all 19 existing cameras and added 2 additional using Hikvision cameras and network equipment connected to a Milestone XProtect Express+ server.
The original system was wired with video baluns allowing us to reuse the majority of the original cabling to fit our new 4MP, 6MP and 8MP cameras, giving a huge quality upgrade from the old system (comparison photos below).
Milestone XProtect was chosen for the VMS platform as it allows easy viewing and playback of all 21 cameras at once, on a new 43 inch 4K monitor fitted behind reception in place of the existing CCTV monitors.
All cabling was fully tested and certified with our Fluke Networks DSX CableAnalyzer giving the customer a full report of which existing cables have failed and may need replacing in the future.
In summary, this new system not only provides an extreme improvment in video quality. But also in system usability, allowing staff to easily search through recordings using analytics to find key events and locate footage of events.
Whilst on site Photuris also added 2 additional Paxton Net2 doors to the existing Net2 system. These included an internal door and an external gate with weatherproof mag lock.