Stockport Homes, the organisation responsible for managing housing stock on behalf of Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, has unveiled a new control room at Cornerstone, its recently opened head office. Designed and built by OpenView Security Solutions (OSS), the new control room will enable the delivery of an efficient concierge and security service to over 2000 properties across Stockport.

In preparation for building the new control room, OSS was asked by Stockport Homes to recommend an upgrade its current fibre optic cable-based network infrastructure which was used to link CCTV cameras installed in 22 residential tower blocks.

According to Matthew Platt, Asset Manager at Stockport Homes: “We were already working with OpenView Security Solutions, which was providing an efficient maintenance support service for our existing security infrastructure and had high levels of confidence in the company’s ability to deliver a cost effective solution to meet our evolving infrastructure requirements.”

OSS recommended the installation of a high level carrier grade Wireless Ethernet network which not only provided higher capacity but also eliminated the high ongoing costs of rented fibre optic circuits. The company then scoped and designed a dual Ethernet ring topology that would provide a resilient, high speed 1GB wireless network based on Bridgewave equipment with the ability to upgrade to 3GB in the future if required. OSS upgraded the main equipment at the tower blocks with Layer 3 Cisco 3850 network switches that offered high levels of bandwidth and the network intelligence to provide the greatest control into the future.

Prior to moving the control room facilities to its new location, OSS also upgraded the CCTV platform with the latest Dallmeier NVR (network video recorder) and software platform to allow all existing equipment to be migrated to the new network.

“This installation demonstrates our ability to deliver and support large-scale LAN/WAN-based IT infrastructures that support the provision of the highest level of services to tenants across wide geographical areas,” added OpenView Security Solutions.