My TN Connection

As networks are asked to carry increasing amounts of delay-sensitive traffic like VoIP and IP video, administrators have been forced to utilize Quality of Service (QoS) techniques more and more often. QoS is used to increase a network’s reliability and speed, by prioritizing particular network traffic over other traffic. Quality of Service methods can really be split into two main QoS categories: Hard and Soft QoS. The remainder of this post will take a look at each of these methods. (more…)

At Transition Networks we’ve always tried to help our customers integrate fiber optics into their copper-rich cabling environments via media conversion.  Media converters have been a vital tool to traditional enterprise networks for many years.  These converters have allowed organizations to experience the benefits of fiber cabling.. (more…)

Why Authentication Matters
Like a passport or a driver’s license, an SSL Certificate or SSH Key is issued by a trusted source, known as the Certificate Authority (CA). Many CA’s will verify the domain name and the existence of your ownership of the domain name, by issuing digital certificates that contain a public key and the identity of the owner. This certificate is also an attestation by the CA that the public key contained in the certificate belongs to the person, organization, server or other entity noted in the certificate.

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It is server software which provides the ability to “secure” transactions that take place on the World Wide Web (www). If a website is running off a HTTPS server you can type in HTTPS instead of HTTP in the URL section of your browser to enter into the “secured mode”. HTTPS is often offered by financial institutions to support their online banking offerings in order to verify that the information being passed between your PC and their server is “secure”. (more…)

Fiber optic cabling provides numerous benefits for transporting the video signaling in a security and surveillance network and you can read more about those benefits in my previous post here. Once the need for fiber optic cabling has been identified or the need to transport the video signal on an existing fiber optic backbone exists, the next problem to solve is how to accomplish this task while protecting your investment in existing copper-based video equipment.

Before we discuss how media conversion can ease this transition to fiber optic cabling, let’s first review the common components and architectures of today’s copper-based video security and surveillance systems.

Whether the video surveillance is analog-based or IP-based, there are a number of common components to most video systems including cameras, cabling infrastructure, monitors and a means of recording the video for future use and playback. Let’s take a quick look at the two main technologies for video systems in use today. (more…)

Video security and surveillance is a hot topic these days and one cannot traverse through daily life any longer without being observed by a security camera at some point during the day. While the cameras themselves are highly visible, the video signal is typically transported back to a central monitoring location via a fixed cabling infrastructure that is often an afterthought due to its limited visibility. This cabling infrastructure is usually copper-based and in the ever increasing reach of today’s video security and surveillance systems, many security professionals are finding that the quality, bandwidth and distance needed to perform even the most basic surveillance is beyond the reach of coaxial and unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cabling. (more…)