School was about to open and the mandate was to get everything working before classes resumed.

In a previous post: Campus Communications: Access and Control I discussed the challenges of one of our campus customers. A short time later their unprotected telephone system took a nosedive along with their phone vendor. I'm happy to report that we snagged the deal but you can be sure that the administrators were reacting and the planning and skin in the game I previously discussed was ours because the customer made little time available for discussions. School was about to open and the mandate was to get everything working before classes resumed.

The internal copper wiring dates to the 1940s and was a deciding factor to not use any DPT (digital proprietary telephones) and to go all IP. The old supporting wiring is poorly laid out in the worst conditions. The data LAN is flat and we felt confident of the new infrastructure having installed it a few years prior. We assembled the system, licensed and updated the software on a Saturday and started installation.

Housekeeping is always important to me and that is making the install look good, neat, orderly and clean. Our customer ordered an APC Netshelter to house the new gear. We used the customer electrician to run signal wires for door phones and door latches--home-running them to the computer room. I used a wheel to estimate the length of runs and determined that we could easily stay within the confines of 590 feet.

The signal wire is 18AWG with a decent shield and outer jacket. Cat5E drops were installed and home-run back to an ADTRAN 1534 WiFi switch with onboard PoE. This stack of switches is located in a classroom loft that is centrally located to minimize the length of drops for all the existing access points (ADTRAN AP150) that we previously installed with Cat6. All four switch locations on campus have both TVSS and dual conversion UPS. The former unprotected telephone system was located in another building interconnected using underground cabling.

We installed Panasonic BB-HCM735A outdoor network cameras above exterior access doors and used available PoE from the ADTRAN 1534 to power them. The camera mounts provide a channel to feed the cable through to the camera housing. The sun shields for the cameras should be used. Spend the time setting the camera presets and other settings. Consistency is important and spending 2-3 hours per camera is worth the time.

Near each door we also installed an outdoor door phone. The Panasonic Communications Assistant Pro client software was installed on the required staff PCs. Each door phone listed in the directory was programmed with a URL of the corresponding camera to auto pop screens displaying the visual of the door. Each door phone extension (Caller-ID) is matched to a camera URL that provides live video coverage for that door. Panasonic’s clever use of Caller-ID and their UC client Communications Assistant Pro won this customer over. We suggested to the staff to add name placards over each door phone—one, so the visitor knows their location and secondly, so the staff is without doubt and so the camera records it too (future evidence).

The immediate challenge was to add VLANs and routing. The customer Sonicwall firewall was setup by the customer's IT contractor to accommodate this. In all the ADTRAN switches we also added VLAN2 for voice. We decided to place the cameras and telephone system assets together in VLAN 2. We spent significant time on this, testing and then debating details and testing over and over. I've discussed MACs before in the IPT world and this proved to be no exception for real world vs ideal world. The school wants simple-to-move, patch and change, but the real world is they don't have all PoE switches nor do they have enough assets to connect every wall port in the campus.