'Real' cost ?

Knot Me.

"The equipment includes: sixty (60) surveillance cameras and supporting software ($2,534,895.00); analytics for sixty (60) surveillance cameras ($180,000.00); video surveillance monitors, furniture, workstations and software for a video surveillance room ($212,520.00); and an outdoor events video monitoring trailer ($37,500). The contract also includes a $41,300.00 Performance Bond, bringing the total project cost to $3,006,215.00. The purchase of the system was made possible through the use of NYS Aid Incentive to Municipalities (Efficiency Grant) funding and, upon the Mayor's request, was formally approved by the Buffalo Common Council."

This might be a photo of the hardware:

Well, a Tropos node is about the same complexity (with a much better package) at about $3,500 each. Top of the line Toshiba PTZ camera is about $1,800. Packaging adds about $500. Power system (w/o solar), about $300. No clue on the "software" but $1,000 each should be tolerable. That makes my guess about $7,100 total.

They paid $2,534,895 for 60 cameras = $42,248 each. 6x markup. I should get out of engineering and go into "crime fighting".

Jeff Liebermann wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Yes the camera 'software' is a mystery. They additionally paid for software for the video surveillance room which I'm guessing is for managing the views and camera's. The camera s/w I can guess would be the comapanies s/w to administer to the device....you'd think a MIB would suffice.

I know that the company I'm at would have been able to do the hardware and installations for that for 1/2 that price....I'm positive most of it was on existing hardware......lamp post's, signal arms, etc. so there wasn't the need for high-dollar construction.

Regards,

DanS

Well, there's a clue in the original article which says: "Johnson Controls, Inc. was the lowest responsible bidder to respond to a Request for Proposals issued by the Mayor's Office,"

Lowest -RESPONSIBLE- bidder is a sneaky way of disclosing that there were lower bids from other companies, but that the bids contained something that turned off the Buffalo bureaucracy. Usually it's something like claiming that the size of the vendor is insufficient to meet the ongoing needs of the city or something equally vague. You might want to determine if the mayors favorite charity received a donation. No clue about the Avrio Group. This is what they call a corporate data sheet:

No numbers of any kind. Maybe Buffalo just tossed a coin?

I managed to determine that there were 8 original bidders, but can't find the names.

Duh... Here are some photos of last years demo:

Crude at best. Look at the last paragraph. Reading between the lines, it looks like Buffalo is using State and Federal money to build up their PD/FD data network, that has nothing to do with the actual cameras. That may explain the high markup.

Proposed camera locations:

That's quite an area to cover with 4.9GHz repeaters/mesh.

"First Arrests Made within Hours of System Installation..."

The article has more techy information on the system. Looks like "evidence grade cameras" Axis cameras and video servers, which is where the optics costs more than the camera. However, looking at the demo photos, I don't think they're using anything sophisticated.

Firetide mesh radios.

OnSSI video management, which methinks is the mystery software:

There are downloadable demos if you wanna play.

Nice setup, but hardly worth $42,000 each.

Jeff Liebermann wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Geez, Jeff, even I wasn't into doing that much research. But thanks, I'll forward this info to the powers that be.

I missed the 'responsible' bidder thing. My gut feeling is that since it was grant money, cost wasn't a concern. There also had to be some kind of kickbacks somewhere....no doubt. Johnson controls is a huge company.

Earlier this year, we, as a small company, provided our OEM I/O radio gear, network design, on-site prop studies, and radio management/monitoring s/w to a project in Florida along I-75 that monitors guardrails along 'Alligator Alley' for collision breakthrus, and relays this info back to HQ. This was 250-ish nodes and the total of our contract was around $260K. I guess they got a really good deal. Granted this was the 900 SS 115Kbps gear, but about 4 times the number of nodes. I even had to design some custom antenna standoffs for these tapered concrete polls they are using at Master locations.

Looking at the map of the camera locations here in Buffalo, there's enough space between them that I can easily see the criminals just moving somewhere else. That's kind fo funny....and not. For instance, on the far right, and centrally located top to bottom is the intersection of Bailey and Genesee. Bailey runs N & S and Genesee is the road going SW to NE. From that intersection, all the way SW down Genesee there is not one other camera. The camera's I've seen are maybe mounted at street light height, at best. Almost all of the homes up and down the sidestreets off of Genesee are close-together, 2 story, city homes, so I don't see too much benefit, other than maybe a couple hundred yards in each direction the camera can 'look' up and down the street.

Thanks again for the info Jeff.

Regards,

DanS

Jeff Liebermann wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I'm thinking it is not really a true mesh network, but broken down into segments of x amount of nodes that can cross communicate, and then backhauled back somehow.

Oddly enough, centrally located is Bailey and Kermit and shown as one of the east-most location. I was there Wednesday, in a bucket truck 40 feet off the ground, and the camera is not located at that intersection. It is actually 1 intersection south, at Bailey & E. Delevan, located nearest to the SE corner. Now what's odd about this is there were 3 antenna's at that location. One was pointing North up Bailey, and then Delevan had an antenna pointing both east and west.

Why would an antenna need to be going east, if this is the east-most location ? It would seem to need to be to get back to some backhaul location.

I'm not a streaming video guru by anymeans, but I'm not sureif one large mesh could support 60 camera's all streaming 30fps 'evidence quality' video.

There doesn't appear to be any mention of where the other 37 firetide nodes were deployed and since these are probably used for interconnectivity it is impossible to get a realistic idea of the number of nodes used to cover each area.

Good point. The cameras might be at ground level, while the mesh nodes (repeaters) might be on the rooftops. That would work, but without knowing the repeater locations, there's not much I can do in the way of guessing channel loading and preformance. 2:1 camera:repeater seems a bit overkill, but that leaves room to add more cameras later without adding repeaters. It also deals with the rather wide spread of the cameras.

Incidentally, the 4.9GHz band is only 50MHz wide. (4.940 to 4.990GHz) with a mix of 1 and 5 Mhz channels. To get full motion 30fps (about

37MHz at 640x480) "evidence quality" video, they would need to use the maximum 20MHz channel bandwidth. That leaves one more 20Mhz "channel", plus the assorted 1Mhz channels. My guess(tm) is that the RFC (regional frequency coordinators) reserved the 2nd 20MHz for other users. That means they're running this thing on store an forward with a single radio. Yech.

Any clue where I might find the original RFQ document?

I did consider searching for the RFP but I stalled at signing up.

Jeff Liebermann wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

(I've now paid back 15 minutes out of the hour I owe you !!!)

or

The picture becomes a little clearer now. One of the pages I came across said there was the radio's for camera locations and an additional 37 units to make the connectivity, so we're up to nearing 100 RF units in use.

I'm not sure that it's the RFP that I want. That only specifies what the system is expected to accomplish and solicits vendors for proposed implimentations. It's the RFQ, where the city specifies the specific hardware, support, test systems, and specifications, that methinks would show the network topology. If not, I would need a copy of the Johnson Controls proposal, which is probably confidential.

Incidentally, it appears that the RFP's are not free from that site. However, they do have a free trial, which is probably sufficient. However, I don't wanna register or pay.

Thanks much.

According to the site they do maintain a list of the RFQ's as well. "Find RFP maintains a comprehensive listing of government RFPs (request for proposal), RFQs (Request for Quotations), RFIs (request for information)"

Bingo. Thanks much. I wished it were the RFQ or bids instead of the RFP, but I can't complain (much).

I quickly skimmed the document and found: "The City has dark fiber available in the University at Buffalo (UB) owned dark fiber network in the City of Buffalo. Two strands of fiber in the University?s backbone network... (etc)" There's the probable backhaul.

Yawn... 6am. Sun is coming up. Time to go back to sleep.

Jeff Liebermann wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Not far from the fiber we are tapping into for a traffic control application. But that is only at the northern most part of the system, so there would need to be more than that one.

I tried to do a location overlay, but this PC is painfully slow...a 1 Ghz Athlon w/256 megs of RAM. It had 512, but one stick died. It was taking

10 seconds just to open a menu and the HD was thrashing away.