Why Surveillance Networks Collapse at the Core
Posted by Jerry Tildsen on Feb 27, 2026
Why Your Surveillance Network Collapses at the Core Switch (And It’s Not the Cameras)
Most surveillance problems get blamed on cameras. Or the recorder. Or the VMS.
But in larger deployments, the failure point is often the network.
Specifically: uplinks that were never sized for real aggregate video traffic.
Deployment takeaway
PoE port count is not network capacity. Up
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Retention Math for IP Cameras: Bitrate, Motion, Storage Traps
Posted by Jerry Tildsen on Feb 20, 2026
Retention Math That Doesn’t Lie: Bitrate, Motion, and the Storage Traps That Break Deployments
Storage planning is where “looks good on paper” deployments go to die. Most retention misses aren’t caused by the NVR brand or the hard drives — they’re caused by assumptions: a default bitrate, a best-case scene, and forgetting overhead.
Deploymen
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PoE Budget Planning for IP Camera Deployments
PoE power planning is one of the most common hidden failure points in commercial surveillance deployments. On paper, everything looks fine: the switch has enough ports, cameras are PoE-capable, and video is online. Then night falls, IR turns on, heaters kick in, and a few cameras start resetting or dropping intermittently. It looks
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