Cameras outgrew the cable before anyone noticed
Higher resolution sensors and longer retention changed what a CCTV run needs. The cabling standard most sites use for cameras was set when the cameras were smaller.
A surveillance installation is judged on the recording, and the recording depends on three things that all sit behind the camera: the run, the power, and the storage.
On the run, a camera at the far end of a long horizontal is the classic marginal link. It works at commissioning, and then it drops frames on a hot afternoon two summers later when the cable is warm and the connector has settled. Cameras are the single most common place we see field terminated links that were never certified, because the installer treated them as low bandwidth devices.
On power, the move to varifocal lenses, IR illumination and heaters has pushed a lot of outdoor cameras past what an older PoE budget assumed per port. A switch that can power every camera at noon may not be able to power every camera at night with the illuminators on, which is exactly when it matters.
On storage, retention is a policy question that arrives as a hardware bill. It is worth deciding the retention period before the recorder is specified, not after.
None of this is exotic. It is just the part of a CCTV BOQ that gets priced last and fails first.
Source: Data Systems desk
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