From Royal Weddings to Royal Ascot

From Royal Weddings to Royal Ascot

Pictured above: Rajant worked alongside Thames Valley Police to boost the already significant public safety and security arrangements at the royal wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle.

Rajant is building its unique portfolio of Kinetic Mesh technologies to address the numerous requirements needed for enhanced public safety and security at planned and unplanned events of all sizes. Often the top priority of public safety organisations and authorities, Rajant’s network allows organisations to rapidly deploy a secure solution and reliable communications.

Such authorities include the specialist departments of the UK Police Forces. Over the past year, Rajant worked very closely with these units to further secure three important upcoming events that were drawing international attention.

There are units within each force, or across a number of forces, responsible for overt and covert surveillance operations. At times, they will be adding security to existing capabilities. On other occasions, they will be operating completely isolated from other networks.

These surveillance units either operate at extremely short notice, due to an incident or operational police requirements, or they have more time to plan for major events, such as public events and activities of public figures—royalty, VIP visitors, etc.

Increasing Video Surveillance
In the case of the Thames Valley Police (TVP), they wished to supplement existing closed-circuit television (CCTV) capabilities with additional coverage, wherever required according to the event being covered.

Three global events performed by the TVP included the royal weddings of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and Princess Eugene and Jack Brooksbank in Windsor and the annual Royal Ascot Race Meeting in Berkshire, England.

Securing the Weddings
The Thames Valley Police needed to provide additional security cameras along the winding processional route to and from Windsor Castle and during the ceremony at St. George’s Chapel for two royal weddings, five months apart. A number of security measures, both visible and non-visible, were required to cover the expected hundreds of thousands of visitors positioned along the roads and the wedding guests attending the ceremonies and multiple receptions.

The Police teamed up with Rajant to provide increased video surveillance coverage, which included deploying the Rajant wireless infrastructure for secure and stable CCTV. The Kinetic Mesh® technology was seamlessly integrated, enabling large amounts of video data to be delivered with high throughput and low latency across the network. IP cameras selected to facilitate multiple viewers and imagery fed into multiple control rooms.

Keeping Royal Racegoers Safe
For Royal Ascot, safety of all racegoers is paramount. Approximately 300,000 racegoers were expected to attend Royal Ascot—including The Queen, additional royals, celebrities, and other high-profile guests. The racecourse worked extremely closely at all times with the Police, the Security Services, and specialist advisers in implementing the appropriate security measures for protection.

A broad range of visible security measures are in place as well as many security measures that couldn’t be seen to ensure races were safe and secure as well as enjoyable. Rajant once again provided the wireless mesh technology for the CCTV that was difficult to reach or not currently served by permanent installed cameras and networks. Notably after the first deployment at Prince Harry’s wedding, the Force managed and installed the Rajant BreadCrumbs independent of Rajant technical teams for both Princess Eugenie’s wedding and Royal Ascot. This ability to rapidly deploy and manage the network after a relatively short introduction to the technology, characterises the ease of deployment of Rajant’s network technology.

Tallying the Outcomes
Delivering additional CCTV systems, which could then be monitored by police and security services, was a top priority for all three events. In each of these affairs, the Rajant network was selected and successful for four key reasons:

One, speed and ease of deployment. Rajant’s network nodes provide power with a resilient, high bandwidth and low latency. The power can and was provisioned in some cases by batteries, therefore enabling the network to be deployed anywhere required.

Two, security. The Rajant Network has built-in security, ranging from entry level AES 128-bit security to military grade encryption.

Three, inter-connection. The interconnection with the Police LAN, and potentially with existing network systems, was very straightforward with the Rajant network as was adding to existing capabilities when needed.

Four, minimised interference. One of the frequencies provided for police use was a specific licensed frequency, which meant that interference from public use of Wi-Fi in 2.4GHZ and 5GHz was minimised.

The feedback from the Police in each of these deployments was that the CCTV footage over the Rajant network was superior to previous attempts at using standard COFDM solutions, and was a number of seconds faster than the television broadcasting imagery.

Rajant is pleased to have played a part in making both wedding days and the race meeting enjoyable, but most importantly safe for all involved. 🖉