City of Houston – Avenidas Plaza and The Galleria

The Avenidas Plaza and the Galleria area are two areas in Houston that are magnets for tourist and locals alike. The Avenidas Plaza has an open pedestrian friendly environment while the Galleria is replete with retail, restaurants and shopping. Large scale events, public, private or even national such as the Super Bowl are often staged in the Avenidas Plaza and crowds often follow up dining and shopping in the Galleria. With large crowds and critical infrastructure, the City of Houston as well as local private businesses determined a secure, high resolution video security system was necessary for both locations and moved to begin implementation of the system in early 2017.

Implementing a comprehensive video security system in an area with existing buildings, streets and daily use and doing it with no disruptions was a steep challenge. Using existing fiber infrastructure as leased lines would have resulted in a monthly Opex that could not be supported. Laying new fiber was not an option not only due to the disruptive implementation but the cost was estimated to be in the millions of dollars, numbers that were not affordable.

When the City and Private business turned to wireless, they found existing sub 6GHz networks as well as public and private WiFi networks had created areas awash in radio interference. Placing a mission critical application such as video security on a network that could incur frequent interruptions from this interference was not an option. The solution needed to not only connect video cameras to a network wirelessly, but there was also the need for a large capacity backbone network for the cameras, both wired and wireless to tie into and transport the traffic to the video monitoring locale.