Unaware consumers are charged by cell phone network and connectivity providers by billing them extra and larger amounts for using SMS is and international dialing subscriptions, or perhaps for making phone calls during peak hours. It certainly seems that no matter how infrequently the cell phone is used the phone bill is always as huge as the previous month if not more.

Unfortunately mobile phone companies use shady mobile contracts to attract subscribers to the offer they are making and substantiate this through underhanded and dubious advertising tactics. They do not believe in full disclosure of the actual cost that you will incur by subscribing to their plan because this goes against their favor.

It has become an industry norm to highlight a base rate and promoted as massive savings on your phone bill. However, this is not the actual case and you must be aware of what your mobile contract stipulates by reading the fine print on the subscription plan.

Before you sign up with any carrier make sure you conduct research and sign up with industry experts like Mobilephonesecrets.com.au and review the industry reports on carrier plans and get interesting tips and techniques on how to cut down your mobile phone bills.

One of the methods used to expand the storage capabilities of digital recording is compressing the data.  Different vendors however use different methods of compression.  The standards and compression ratios also vary widely.

The formula that is used to assess the storage capabilities in binary forms is as follows -

Capacity =  n X f X s X a X d
K
Where n denotes the number of CCTV cameras used, f denotes the rate of frames per second, s denotes the size in terms of kilobytes of the compressed frames, a denotes the percentage of activity periods of each camera; d denotes the duration in terms of days used, and k denotes the constant that is equal to 1213.6.

With the coming into operation of closed circuit digital still cameras with resolution of 1600 X 1200 pixels.  The advantage with these cameras is that they have higher resolution compared to typical video cameras and also have greater storage capabilities. You can also use low cost digital still cameras for CCTV tasks using the CCDP software.  The camera then will be controlled directly from your computer system.

So far as recording and storage is concerned the cctv dvr can be replaced conveniently with the combination of digital still cameras with CCDP software.  However for monitoring purposes the CCTV combination works better.