Taxi and car hire in Kent to install in-car CCTV with EU funding

Taxi and car hire in Kent to install in-car CCTV with EU funding. The total funding available for the in-car safety CCTV cameras is £118,000. Driver can now install CCTV camera in vehicle with over 75% cost to be subsidized by the Fund. Perhaps more councils will follow suit?

Taxis to get CCTV

9:29am, 30th OCtober 2007

By Charlotte McDonald

TAXI drivers in Gravesham are one step closer to getting CCTV cameras in their cabs after securing EU cash.

Cabbies have been calling for more security measures following the death of Gian Chand Bajar, a taxi driver found lying in the road in St Benedict's Avenue, Gravesend, on May 23.

The 71-year-old father-of-six is thought to have been run over by his own car.

Now £59,000 has been secured from the EU's Urban Thames Gateway Kent fund.

This will be matched pound-for-pound by a partnership of the drivers themselves, Gravesham Council, the police and the multi-agency Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership which deals with public safety.

It will make a total of £118,000.

Gravesham's United Taxi Group communications officer Rick Davis said: "This is far beyond our greatest expectations.

"I am sure other councils and authorities will follow suit, so this will be a flagship scheme.

"We have come an awfully long way."

More than 100 taxi and private hire drivers have already signed up to have CCTV in their cars.

The council hopes to have some of these cameras in place within weeks.

Drivers will only have to pay at most a fifth of the overall cost as a contribution towards the cost of the in-cab equipment.

It is estimated the cost of a camera for one vehicle will be between £400 and £500.

Mr Davis added: "The fact the drivers can have this added protection at a reasonable price is unbelieavable.

"Everybody has worked hard together.

"It wouldn't have worked without this co-operation."

There are 250 drivers in Gravesham and help with funding these cameras will be available to all of them.

Suggestions of getting CCTV installed in cars were discussed at the first joint meeting between the drivers, the council and the police following Mr Bajar's death in May.

Since then the council, the police and the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership have met regularly with the United Taxi Group.

Gravesham Council leader Councillor Mike Snelling said: "It had been an ambition of the council for a long time to help the drivers get CCTV and I am very pleased we have been able to achieve this.

"Community safety is the council's number one priority and we have pledged to make the borough safer."

Cab drivers and the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership members have been invited to an open day at Brands Hatch next week when a range of CCTV and other safety equipment will be displayed.

Inspector Paul Anderson is running the Kent police work on the project through the Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership.

He said: "Over the past six months, there has been a considerable amount of work done to source suitable safety products which will provide reassurance to drivers and passengers, will deter potential criminals and also provide hard evidence to assist in any criminal investigations.

"I look forward to seeing this technology in taxis in north Kent over the coming months."

Luke Andrew Aujila, of no fixed address, has been charged with the murder of Mr Bajar.

Aujila, who was 20 at the time of being arrested in connection with Mr Bajar's death, is currently in custody.

A rising compression codec in the making – AVS ( Audio Video Standard)

China Netcom has been field trialling the Chinese version of H.264/AAC Video/Audio compression codec on IPTV for half year, the success of the China “home made” AVS (Audio Video Standard) codec in the trial will result in the mass deployment of AVS codec as a compulsory IPTV standard in green field deployment and also to replace the existing system which are using MPEG2/4 and H.264 standard. China Telecom will soon be follow suit.

They are so confidence in the new AVS codec and are now applying for national approval to be implemented on CCTV security surveillance equipment.

It looks like the national implementation of AVS codec is more a commercial reason (not need to pay loyalty/license fee for using overseas patents) than technology superiority.

For those who can read Chinese, here is the news link

Europe shows 230% growth in IPTV services in the last 12 months

New broadband and IPTV statistics shows that Europe has the largest growth in IPTV services subscription in the last 12 months, overtaking Asia Pacific, with 230% of growth rate. France is the world leader with 2.5millions IPTV subscribers. The future growth of IPTV will be boots by the continuous deployment of ADSL2+, as DSL remains the major broadband access medium representing ~66% of global broadband services. However, the world leader in IPTV service, France Telecom and Hong Kong’s PCCW, both have invested in FTTH (fibre to the home), as DSL (copper wire) bandwidth cannot be guaranteed over distance.

O2 has recently announced the launching date of its broadband service to be on 15 October 2007. O2 broadband service will base on its Broadband Internet arm – Be*, which offer up to 24Mb connection using ADSL2+. This will give O2 a great platform to provide “quad play” services (Internet, TV, voice and mobile) to compete with “triple play” (Internet, TV and voice) provided by incumbent fixed line operator such as BT.

Oct 09, 2007
telecomasia.net

The number of people signing up to IPTV service increased by 179% in the 12 months to June 30, 2007, according to Point Topic.

The report, published Monday at the Broadband World Forum Europe in Berlin by the DSL Forum, reveals that over 8.2 million people are now connected to IPTV services.

Over three million subscribers were added in Europe during the period, making it the strongest market in terms of growth (231% in 12 months) and total subscriber numbers (nearly five million).

Asia Pacific is the second largest market of IPTV, with its total subscriber base growing 120% to nearly 2.2 million, followed by Americas with over one million of IPTV subscribers, up 161% during the period.

“Top markets like France (2,550,000 customers) and Hong Kong (938,000 customers) show that IPTV can be deployed rapidly to large numbers of subscribers, if the market conditions are right,” said Point Topic senior analyst John Bosnell.

“On the demand side, competitive and clear bundle pricing and content deals will help to attract customers to IPTV services, while on the supply side, making IPTV easier to install and develop will help to deliver IPTV services to a wider subscriber base.”

Bosnell added that developing and agreeing to standards will help to simplify the delivery process and drive higher take-up in other markets too.

Western Europe continues to have the most broadband users, with 72 million of the 86 million broadband subscribers using DSL.

The Eastern Europe DSL market, while small at less than 14 million, had the strongest growth at over 60% in the 12 months to June 30.

The US has the most broadband subscribers (over 63 million), but China tops the DSL subscriber list with over 44 million of its 59 million broadband users connected via DSL.

According to the study, 15 countries now have over three million DSL subscribers, and 29 have over one million subscribers.

DSL remains the most popular access technology, with over 200 million, or 66% of the world’s 313 million broadband subscribers connecting via DSL.

The global market share of broadband technologies remains largely unchanged from December 2006, with almost 22%of subscribers using cable, and just over 10% using FTTx.

Criminal suspect captured on CCTV camera while buying CCTV using a stolen credit card.

How irony is this – a blunder criminal spent over thousand pounds on CCTV gears with a STOLEN credit card in a shop that sell CCTV cameras. Obviously UK “criminals” still need more awareness and education on CCTV to know that current CCTV technologies are different from what they saw on BBC’s “crime watch”. Those numerous tapes swapping, hours of playback searching on blurry and jerky images are gradually replaced with user friendly digital surveillance system which produces clear picture and uses intelligence search function for easy prosecution purposes. Do we need another millions of CCTVs? Or good CCTVs that installed in the right place and does the right job!

Picture scanned from The Sun, Saturday, 6^th Oct 2007, click on picture for enlarged picture for easy reading.

If you know this guy please ring the confidential hotline 0207 782 4102 or email 6300@thesun.co.uk

Here are two colour image of the suspect captured by the IP CCTV system installed in iViewCameras showroom in Fulham, London.

Together we can makes our streets safer to walk on.

Surveillance cameras yes, speed camera NO! (call me double standard ;-p)

UK CCTV equipment sales remain strong

One interesting find out in the recent UK CCTV Market Development report, it seems like the analyst started to see the trends in DIY CCTV. The value of equipment sales is expected to represent strong growth over the importance of installation and maintenance values, which ownership is gradually taken up by enduser, the growth in IP/networked surveillance system has reflected such. Most company in-house IT team will be able to install and commission IP CCTV system with sufficient training and support from the equipment seller.

Also we are now seeing more home networking device manufacturer targeting the lucrative IPCCTV surveillance market. Most of their earlier equipment is just an evolved webcam which is alright for remote monitoring purpose but not for video and audio recording. This has been changed in recent years, but improvement remains to be seen. If you are looking for IP surveillance recording software, give iCatcher a try,

http://www.ipcctvcameras.co.uk/IV_ICATCHER_CONSOLE_2IPCCTVCamerasProductDetails.htm

CCTV still going strong

03 Oct 07

By Alan Hyder

It may have slowed slightly from the boom time in city centre installations, but there is plenty of growth predicted in the UK CCTV market over the next few years …

Newer CCTV technologies such as mobile CCTV, ANPR and "algorithmic" (video analytics) systems will be areas of strong growth in the CCTV sector over the next few years.

Opportunities in commercial and non-residential construction, particularly the 2012 Olympics, will also boost the market, says a CCTV survey.

Increased price competition and the completion of major city centre schemes has meant CCTV has developed at more modest levels in the last few years but there are still growth opportunities in the commercial sector as the trend to replace guards with CCTV continues.

The UK CCTV Market Development Report says the UK market (including sales and rental income) increased each year from 2002 to last year. In the early years of the review period, growth was at 5-7 per cent, boosted by major town and city schemes.

By last year, with the completion of many of these schemes, it had slowed to 4 per cent.

"Nonetheless MBD believes there still exists strong growth potential with some areas of the market, in particular the digital and networked video solutions sectors and new technology areas such as mobile CCTV systems, automatic number plate recognition schemes and algorithmic systems. The commercial sector also continues to provide opportunities for CCTV installations as the trend of substituting manned security continues."

The market is expected to grow in the forecast up to 2011 although levels are "expected to remain relatively moderate" at around 2 per cent per annum in real terms.

“Mobile CCTV, ANPR and algorithmic systems show big potential”

By 2011 the value of the market is forecast to reach £1195m at 2006 prices. Demand for digital and networked systems is expected to continue to be buoyant although prices are anticipated to fall in these sectors.

Further sectors expected to show strong growth include remote monitoring services, rapid deployment cameras and alarm activated systems.

"Anticipated output growth in a number of construction sectors, most notably the commercial and public non-residential sectors, as well as the 2012 Olympics, will provide a positive impetus for the CCTV market. However, intense price competition and increased import penetration from low cost manufacturers at the lower end of the market are expected to remain features of the CCTV market.

The proportional importance of installation revenue is forecast to decline from 46 per cent in 2006 to 45 per cent by 2011 "partly reflecting the increasing popularity of digital and networked systems". Even so, the value of installations is forecast to continue to increase, culminating in real term growth of 7 per cent between 2006 and 2011.

The value of equipment sales is expected to represent strong growth with an overall increase of 14 per cent in real terms forecast from now until 2011. Despite relatively buoyant demand, "intense price competition is likely to be a feature."

The value of maintenance taken out by end users will increase by 10 per cent in real terms to 2011. The proportional importance of maintenance will remain stable at 19 per cent of the total CCTV market although "stronger growth is expected to be hindered by the rising popularity of IP enabled systems, which tend to have lower maintenance costs."

Fibre optic cable that can be bend and deploy as copper cable

ClearCurve is a breakthrough in the fibre optic cable, which now allow fibre cables to be bent without losing signal. This will pave the deployment of fibre optic in the last mile, such as FFTH of the telecommunication network, to replace the old and bandwidth restricted copper cable. Fibre optics cable transmitting medium is light, thus the bandwidth potential is almost infinite, it’s dependent on the transceiver device and wavelength (colour) chosen.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20071002/tc_pcworld/137966

IPTV makes it to the TV set, how about the bandwidth for HD IPTV?

IPTV is driving the broadband demand. BT Vision’s V-box, is a mixture of Freeview (over terrestrial aerial), PVR (HDD recorder) and VOD download (over broadband), a so called hybrid IPTV platform for BT broadband subscriber. BBC iPlayer is another Internet TV service that demand high bandwidth for content streaming, though it is a free service provide by BBC, user will still need reasonably fast connection and high bandwidth usage package. But why there isn’t a sign of pure IPTV servie in UK? As Freeview (terrestrial aerial) has becoming the de facto terrestrial TV of choice for most household, with many other also subscribe to VirginMedia (cable) and Sky (satellite), those has been the competitive barrier for a pure IPTV provider. Currently high definition (HD) broadcast is available under VirginMedia and Sky with extra subscription fees, BBC will soon be broadcasting its HDTV channel for free. Thus, for IPTV to break through the UK market, HD contents is highly required in order to stay competitive and different, the sooner the better. The problem is do we have affordable high speed broadband infrastructure ready for such service?

Current BT Vision required at least 4Mb connection, HD contents will demands at least 16Mb, not even BT claimed “next generation” ADSL2+ (~16Mb in reality) can cope with that in peak hours.

IPTV makes it to the TV set

Oct 03, 2007
By Al Senia
Telecom Asia

Delivering web TV to a mass audience has long been a dream of web entrepreneurs. As fiber deployments increase around the world, IPTV has become more of a mainstream product, but for the most part, this involves viewing the video on a computer screen.

Slingbox has been the largest commercial success so far: users connect the device to their cable or satellite service and the programming is streamed over the web for viewing on a computer anywhere there is a broadband connection. But that still leaves the large-screen TV out in the cold.

During the last year, however, there have been some breakthroughs from companies such as HP and Sony with "smart televisions" that can seamlessly move video content from the web to the home TV. Even Apple jumped in, recently introducing its Apple TV, which uses a wireless connection to stream music and movies from a computer to a TV. All of these have been ambitious attempts that have met with decidedly mixed consumer receptions.

Now there's new technology and an interesting business model that is starting to gain traction: using the web as backhaul to beam native TV programs from countries like China and the Philippines to expatriates in North America and around the world.

NeuLion, a New York-based startup, offers an IPTV platform that delivers television stations through a set-top box directly to the home TV. Earlier this year, ABS-CBN International licensed NeuLion's IPTV platform to deliver four live broadcast channels and two radio channels that originate in Manila to subscriber TVs without the use of a computer. The service already has 6,000 subscribers in Japan and recently rolled out in Canada and the US. It could well be expanded to other countries with sizeable Filipino communities.

"It's all of our programming in our own service," said Rafael Lopez, COO at ABS-CBN International. "The technology will allow us to offer consumers both a linear television experience, as well as new video-on-demand services."

Chinese service

Chris Wagner, executive VP and co-founder of NeuLion, says a similar service is aimed at overseas Chinese residents. KyLinTV, which has offices in Beijing and New York, is using NeuLion's technology to streams 33 television channels to about 25,000 subscribers in the US at a cost of about $30 a month. Video-on-demand also is available. Wagner says the company is likely to expand the service to viewers in other countries. There are an estimated four million Chinese living in the US and an estimated 40 million worldwide. KyLin hired a Chinese company, Run Media Inc., to help obtain the rights to the Chinese TV programming.

NeuLion acts as a service provider for its partners, providing content management, subscriber management, digital-rights management, billing services and content delivery through the company's set-top IPTV platform. The set-top box is manufactured in China. It provides real-time H.264/MPEG-4 AVC encoding and transcoding; a low bit-rate of 700 kbps streaming straight to the TV; and scalable simultaneous streaming over RTP and RTSP protocol. It is an open source Linux-based platform with an integrated CPU and built-in 802.11g Wi-Fi support. "We can do HD, but we need more bandwidth," says Wagner. "We are not quite there yet."

http://www.telecomasia.net/article.php?type=article&id_article=5857

3Com sold to Bain with Huawei as minority owner and strategic partner.

http://www.eetasia.com/ART_8800482022_590626_NT_3c44f774.HTM

What a roller coaster relationship between Huawei and 3Com

1. Huawei and 3Com setup joint venture Huawei-3COM (H3C) in 2003, with Huawei leads the JV at 51% stake, they aim to challenge Cisco stake in enterprise networking segment.
2. 3Com bought 2% stake from Huawei in 2005 to take the controlling stake of H3C.
   
3. 3Com approached Huawei and buyout the remaining 49% of H3C stake own by Huawei in 2006 (H3C valuation was $1.8B).
4. Huawei (20%) and Bain (80%) joint bid for 3Com group (not just H3C) has been accept in the $2.2B acquisition offer in Sep 2007.

Huawei views the acquisition as a commercial investment with strategic partnership to seize the global growth in enterprise networking segment, as their main focus is still in the more lucrative big scale telecommunications project – 3G Mobile network, Optical transmission and Next generation fixed and wireless Broadband Access.

HomePlug and Panasonic submitted joint proposal for Boradband over Powerline (BPL). BPL to challege DSL and cable dominat in broadband

http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/071001/16/4bk5k.html

The two major players in home powerline networking will present a joint proposal for Broadband over Powerline (BPL). This synegic proposal will paves the IEEE P1901 workgraoup in standardising the BPL technologies. We will soon see the emerge of a gloabla standrd to provide broadband over power cable, to challege the current DSL and cable broadband which running on copper and coaxial.

For user who has got Panasonic’s HD-PLC or HomePlug AV installed, which are not currently interoperative, the joint proposal should ensures both product to interwork under the new P1901 standard.

If you want to experience HD contents delivered over your home power circuits or hook up IP camera (IPCAM) without laying new Ethernet cable allover your house, why not try the exisitng Panasonic PA100KT.

http://www.ipcctvcameras.co.uk/IV_PAN_BL-PA100KTIPCCTVCamerasProductDetails.htm