A quick Q&A with our CCTV Specialist, Nick Metcalfe
If you manage CCTV infrastructure, recurring faults will probably feel familiar. Cameras dropping offline, intermittent signal issues and repeated resets are all things most teams deal with at some point.
To help provide some answers about why these problems occur and what organisations can do to alleviate some of these issues, here’s a Q&A with our in house Wireless CCTV expert, Nick Metcalfe.
One of the biggest frustrations people seem to have is recurring faults. Why do these issues keep coming back?
A lot of the time, it’s because people are dealing with the fault they can see rather than what’s sitting behind it.
If a camera drops offline, naturally the focus goes straight to the camera. Sometimes that is the issue, but quite often the problem sits somewhere else in the system. It might be connectivity, transmission, interference or simply infrastructure that’s come under more pressure over time.
The difficult thing is that systems usually continue to work, at least most of the time. So these issues can build gradually without there ever being one obvious failure point.
Your new guide reflects on issues reported by more than 100 councils. Where did you get that information from?
We were seeing a lot of similar issues coming up across different CCTV environments and wanted to understand whether those problems were isolated or part of a wider pattern, so we submitted an FOI request to get to the bottom of the trends.
When you’re working closely with systems over time, you naturally start noticing certain themes. We became curious about how common those experiences actually were.
The FOI requests were really about stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. Rather than focusing on individual projects or assumptions, we wanted to understand what councils themselves were reporting over a longer period of time.
Was there anything in the responses that surprised you?
What stood out most was how often the same issues appeared.
Connectivity problems came up repeatedly, including unstable wireless links, transmission faults and cameras losing connection. Power-related issues were also common, along with intermittent faults that required repeated resets or ongoing maintenance.
What didn’t appear nearly as often as people might expect was vandalism.
When you look across all of that together, it paints a pretty clear picture. A lot of recurring faults aren’t isolated incidents. They’re often linked to how systems are connected and supported over time.
Is this becoming more common as systems grow?
Definitely. Most CCTV systems aren’t designed and delivered all at once. They evolve over time. Individually, decisions all make sense as you make them. The problem is that the infrastructure underneath doesn’t always evolve at the same pace.
That’s usually where reliability starts to drift. Not because anything is fundamentally wrong, but because the system is now being asked to do something different from what it was originally designed for.
What’s the biggest mistake organisations make when trying to improve reliability?
Treating connectivity as separate from the CCTV system itself.
The network tends to sit in the background until something goes wrong, but it’s carrying everything. As systems grow, the demands on that infrastructure increase quite significantly.
If that side of things isn’t considered properly, upgrades don’t always deliver the improvement people expect. Sometimes they actually expose weaknesses that were already there.
Where should people start?
In the new guide I’ve put together, I offer 5 tips for what CCTV Manager can do to make improvements. This has been written factoring in the common issues that have been reported from real life CCTV systems.
If anyone is looking for how they can sort out some of the many recurring issues they’re seeing, then I’d highly recommend this as a place to start.
Alternatively, I’d be happy to offer any advice directly, if people want to get in touch with me.
Next Steps
To download Nick’s new free guide, please visit our CCTV Guide page. Or please complete our contact form to let us know your concerns and Nick will call you back.
