An outdoor wireless CCTV transmission product chosen by Euro Car Parks has been deployed at Sainsbury car parks around the UK. Sainsbury’s with 1,000 stores nationwide, offers its customers free parking. However, not all visitors to Sainsbury’s car parks actually use the store; resulting in lost sales and revenue.
Stores are often in town centres where car parking is limited. This means the supermarket wants to be sure that customers have somewhere to park when they visit to shop. However, the nationwide store chain began noticing that not all of the people using their car parks were in fact shopping there, thereby reducing the number of spaces available for customers. hence the supermarket sought to manage their car parks more. The national car park management company, Euro Car Parks (ECP), was appointed to install ANPR to combat this ‘rogue’ parking. People leaving their vehicles in the supermarket’s car parks for more than the permitted time will now automatically receive a Parking Charge Notice through the post. ECP enlisted the help of general building firm MERR Construction to install PIPS ANPR cameras that would read and store the number plates of vehicles entering and exiting the car parks managed by ECP.
To avoid any potential disruption to shoppers and to keep costs as low as possible, ECP decided to use wireless as the transmission medium for sending the number plate images from the ANPR cameras to the stores, where they were then stored on their network. This meant that civil engineering works to install a fibre network to the camera were not needed. Power for the wireless radios and cameras comes via a car park lighting column.
Wavesight’s WaveSPRINT point-to-point links were chosen to transmit the number plate images. WaveSPRINT the makers say eliminates the planning delays and disruption associated with laying fibre or leasing lines. This means lower deployment costs and faster return on investment, besides a re-deployable asset.
James Carey, project manager at Euro Car Parks said: “We were confident that Wavesight could come up with a low-cost car park solution that would allow us to deploy our ANPR cameras at a number of Sainsbury car parks across the UK. The link required was fast to install and minimised any disruption to Sainsbury’s customers.”
About Wavesight
Wavesight is a provider of outdoor wireless networks for wireless CCTV surveillance and Ethernet bridging applications. The firm claims to deliver transmission bandwidths up to 4 Gbps over distances as great as 60 km where there is clear line of sight.
Wavesight’ provides services from initial site survey to network planning, installation and commissioning.
