ERH Upgrade CCTV along UK M4 Smart-Motorway

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - June 13, 2019 - PRLog -- According to a recent study¹, traffic congestion costs households more than US$1400 per driver, per year. This includes the value of the time they needlessly spent sitting in traffic jams, additional fuel cost,  social cost of emissions released, and the increase in the prices of goods and services due to congestion faced by businesses. It's no wonder that taxpayers around the world are pressuring governments to step up and make infrastructure investments to address this rapidly growing concern.

One popular, yet still emerging, the solution is upgrading existing motorways and highways to 'Smart Motorways'. This involves implementing Active Traffic Management (ATM) techniques to reduce congestion by applying variable speed limits and utilizing access lanes or hard shoulders during peak times. An essential component of these systems is CCTV camera footage that is generally transmitted across long distance single mode fiber lines to control centers.

Jack Stuckely, Contract Communications Manager at ERH, recently discussed a maintenance project along the M4 Smart Motorway in the UK. "We look after anything that has a power and comms cable along the Welsh section of the M4 Motorway. This includes CCTV, signage, emergency phones, flashing lights and more. This project was about upgrading 300 existing CCTV cameras that feed data back to traffic control centers in Wales. We were looking to replace the cameras, which were starting to fail, with new HD cameras."

Because the new HD cameras did not have a fiber connection port, Perle Media Converters (https://www.perle.com/products/media-converters/media-con...) were installed to act as the interface between the cameras and the single mode fiber.

Jack summarises, "The Perle Media Converters offer a neat solution. We have multiple cameras feeding back into a chassis mounted unit at the transmission station, from which we can get images onto the network and onto the video wall in the control room. Overall, I cannot praise the Perle team enough. They are easy to work with and we had great support right from the outset."

Read the full Case Study here (https://www.perle.com/applications_solutions/transportati...).

About ERH: http://erh.co.uk

Established in 1992, ERH works with clients across the UK providing installation, maintenance and construction services.

¹ Cookson, Graham. "INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard (https://www.dmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/INRIX_2017_Traffic_Scorecard_Final_2.pdf)". February 2018. Web. 12 November 2018