Roadside cameras on a 3G budget.
A national roads project needed live video from remote sites in a central control room, over 3G and GPRS only. The bandwidth for continuous live streaming was not affordable, so the software had to change instead of the network.
The problem.
Bandwidth in the region was expensive enough that a conventional IP surveillance rollout did not add up. The integrator was tasked with getting live video from remote roadside sites back to one control room using 3G and GPRS exclusively — links that cannot carry continuous full-rate video, and where every megabyte has a price.
The deployment.
Rather than degrade every camera permanently, a module was developed specifically for the Axis cameras in use: Motion JPEG images refreshed at a set interval as the normal state, with the operator able to switch that camera to full live view for a defined period the moment something happened. Development took 25 days.
The result.
The control room got usable awareness of every remote site continuously, and full-quality live video on the sites that mattered at the moment they mattered — without paying for a permanent live stream from cameras watching an empty road.
The principle is still how VISEC is deployed on constrained links: a lighter stream profile for routine viewing, the higher-resolution stream where it earns the bandwidth. For a camera on the end of a slow connection, add it by stream address and give it the lighter profile.
This case study is also available as the original PDF.
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