Nestled in Statesboro, Ga., Georgia Southern University has been advancing the educational and economic aspirations of Georgians for more than 100 years. Nearly 20,000 students call Georgia Southern University’s 700-acre campus their educational home, and in 2012 the school was named the fourth most popular university in the country by U.S. News and World Report.
The Customer
Nestled in Statesboro, Ga., Georgia Southern University has been advancing the educational and economic aspirations of Georgians for more than 100 years. Nearly 20,000 students call Georgia Southern University's 700-acre campus their educational home, and in 2012 the school was named the fourth most popular university in the country by U.S. News and World Report.
The Challenge
Georgia Southern University has developed an extensive surveillance system that encompasses more than 1,100 cameras, comprised of about half analog and half IP-based cameras. But even such a large-scale system has fallen short when it comes to meeting the flexibility demands of a college campus.
“One of the major challenges of a large university is having a lot of outdoor spaces, including parking lots, walking spaces and quads, that are active 24 hours per day,” said Rob Swift, CATV and CCTV Services Manager, Georgia Southern University. “Due to the nature and size, we can't install full-on hard wired infrastructure throughout every square-inch of campus.”
Swift also found that the constant influx of events – whether organized by students, faculty or outside organizations – can shift security needs on a daily basis. Large crowds of people may gather in one area for a particular event on Monday and in a completely different area on Tuesday. The surveillance options offered by traditional camera manufacturers today proved too uncompromising for such dynamic and evolving security needs.
The MicroPower Solution
For some time, Swift thought he had the only feasible solution to the university's unique security demands. He and the security team had outfitted a trailer with two surveillance cameras mounted to a telescoping mast that could be repositioned with a simple service call across campus as surveillance needs changed.
However, this solution proved to be impractical. The size of the trailer made moving it from one end of campus to the other a security risk in its own right, and the two cameras mounted to the top of the mast didn't offer the best view in every application.
Georgia Southern is now leveraging two Rugged-i cameras from MicroPower Technologies, a provider of surveillance solutions optimized for rapid, cost-effective deployment. The two solar powered cameras require absolutely no cables for power or data transmission and therefore do not require trenching, which saves thousands of dollars in installation costs. The cameras, coupled with the MiniHub, an indoor central hub for use with MicroPower's line of surveillance cameras, can be quickly un-mounted and re-mounted with a simple service call as security needs change. The two cameras currently monitor a high-traffic walkway that connects many of the school's buildings.
Customer Comments
“The hope is that we can develop a small fleet of these cameras and can re-deploy them as needed. We want to see if we can take it down from one light pole today and put it on another light pole tomorrow based on where an event is going to be,” Swift said. “MicroPower's Helios surveillance solution delivers the flexibility that all college campuses need.”