City of Cape Town

The City of Cape Town is the metropolitan municipality that governs Cape Town, South Africa. In addition to being the second most populous city in South Africa, Cape Town is regarded as one of the world’s most beautiful cities thanks to its geography and consequently is Africa’s leading tourist destination. It is the provincial capital of the Western Cape, as well as the legislative capital of South Africa, where the National Parliament and many government offices are located. Cape Town is famous for its harbour as well as its’ prominent landmarks such as Table Mountain and Cape Point.

Pre-existing situation & UTCFS’s role

Previously, each department in the City of Cape Town directed its own procurement of video equipment, which meant that multiple vendors and multiple products were being used throughout the city. The City of Cape Town’s video department was formed to consolidate video installations, but there was still no product standardisation, resulting in a maintenance nightmare. As Cape Town has multiple sites with individual requirements, a reliable, yet very flexible video system was needed. Picture quality was also very important, as facial recognition was necessary for legal purposes. The City also sought a single vendor, from whom they could purchase all of their equipment and who understood their unique, varying requirements.

UTCFS’s solution

UTCFS initially provided the City with the very reliable DVMRE – digital video recording (DVR) – range, owing to its high picture quality, robustness and flexibility, allowing it to be used in both a control room environment with multiple recorders and video walls and in a stand-alone environment with remote viewing capabilities via the network. As technology evolved, the City of Cape Town upgraded seamlessly to UTCFS’s SymSafe DVR range, which offers the City better frame rates, bandwidth usage and recording capabilities while still adhering to the initial requirements of reliability and ease of use. While the current roll-out is ongoing, the City of Cape Town has over 200 sites equipped with UTCFS products including over 3,000 cameras and over 300 digital recorders. As a result of UTCFS’s strong focus on the end-user as well as added-value services, the City of Cape Town’s video department standardised on UTCFS’s complete range of video recorders and cameras.