One of the largest challenges for outdoor surveillance is backhaul: How do you bring the video back to the central monitoring location? Without question, doing so consumes a large part of any outdoor surveillance deployment’s capital and operational budget -- thousands per camera for backhaul is relatively common. 

The two most common approaches are building your own wired or wireless networks. Wired access, if even possible across city streets, often requires huge up-front costs for trenching and conduits. Building your own wireless system, while often less expensive than wired, still has significant up-front costs. Additionally, wireless presents frequent reliability issues (especially if the system is poorly designed, installed or maintained) as well as notable operation and maintenance costs.

Cellular, wireless provided by telecommunication carriers, has only started to compete with the traditional two options above. First, 3G speeds became widely available but 5GB per month caps on bandwidth have limited its usability.  Now, with the expansion of 4G, increased speeds, and 'unlimited' bandwidth, cellular becomes much more attractive for use in video surveillance deployments.

A recent product from Moog Videolarm, called the Liberty Series, aims to simplify the use of cellular backhaul. Consisting of two models, the Liberty series are intended to be a solution for rapid deployment of surveillance cameras on 3G/4G networks. All that is required is 120V power and a USB 3G or 4G modem. We've embedded Videolarm's overview that does a good job on showing what the product is:

In this report, we share our findings from testing the Liberty Series. As a housing, the product is fairly straightforward. The key issues we found are the tradeoffs on price, feature sets and design constraints. Inside the PRO section, we dig into these elements.

Contrast to our test on Ubiquiti - an offering for low cost DIY wireless surveillance networks.