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Tech Tip 11 - Life cycle costs of surveillance systems (continued)

Network switches - useful lifecycle of 6 years

The total cost of network switches and cable can be as low as 5% to 15% of the entire surveillance project. It is interesting to note, however, with the continued drive to convergence that more appliances are added to switches through the lifecycle and this should be factored in upfront.

The total Watts of a Power-over-Ethernet switch needs to be calculated to accommodate all the appliances connected; power draw at start up is usually the greatest especially with Hi POE devices such as PTZ cameras. Managed switches become more important as the complexity of the network increases. Not many sites will have less than a 1-gigabyte backbone these days and the back plane and uplinks of the switch should accommodate this.

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