Unique (Flughafen Zürich AG)

Unique (Flughafen Zürich AG) operates Switzerland’s renowned traffic hub and meeting place, the Zurich Airport, and is responsible for the airport’s operational management. The airport itself includes about 180 different companies. Unique employs approximately 1,400 people and together with over 260 airport partners, the combined total roughly equals 21,000 employees. Unique ensures the smooth running of air travel infrastructure at Zurich, to the benefit of greater Zurich and Switzerland as a whole.

Pre-existing situation & UTCFS’s role

The Zurich Airport needed to upgrade its aging video surveillance system, for which obtaining replacement parts was often very difficult. Furthermore, the system could not be expanded, and scalability was essential.

UTCFS’s solution

UTCFS offered Unique a combined solution for the Zurich Airport that integrates the existing 330 analogue cameras using 46 of UTCFS’s digital encoders. The encoders digitise the camera data so that it can be transferred to the monitoring stations. Each monitoring station is equipped with 40 terabyte local storage space, storing over 400 million images, and events can be saved to central storage (800 Gb) from these local stations, if necessary. In order to avoid the costs associated with establishing a new network, the existing IP network was used to transfer all data. An additional advantage of the system is that it easily allows future expansions. With UTCFS’s system installed, Unique is able to monitor all events on its premises and thus offers a safe environment to those passing through the Zurich Airport.