Best Cabling Solution for a Hotel

[missmimi 0]

Hi everyone,

 

Our customer, a 10 floor hotel will be installing over 50 cameras and they do not want to have too many cables running back to the DVR which is located at the basement. We are thinking IP cameras or fiber optic cabling. Can anyone advise which is a better option? Thanks in advance!

[jeromephone 6]

it probably comes down to cost, If you can get a data switch on every floor or maybe every other floor you could tie those together with fiber and the run cat 6 to the cameras as they will need to be fed by POE THis will give you plenty of bandwith especally if you run seperate strands to each floor. Your big expense will be in the switches and terminating the fiber.

[Soundy 1]

^Good plan, but Cat6 isn't required for PoE; Cat5e works fine. Since the cameras are all (so far) only 10/100, you don't need it for the bandwidth either.

 

PoE vs. centralized power is a balancing act - the switches cost more, but you don't need the additional wire to each camera, or the power can (probably one per floor).

 

You're thinking 50 cameras over 10 floors... so average 5 cameras per floor. You could probably do this at a decent cost using Cisco/Linksys SFE-1000P switches: they have eight 10/100 PoE ports, and two gigabit/fiber uplink ports; one on a floor would easily support the cameras, with one GbE port for uplink to the floor above, and one to downlink to the floor below.

 

If you don't want to go IP, you could look at some of the video-over-Cat5 multiplexing solutions from the likes of NVT and MxuLab, allowing up to 16 cameras to run over a single Cat5e cable.