Skip to content
Hanwha Vision and Wisenet WAVE
Hanwha Vision and Wisenet WAVE Integrator
Evolution is a certified integrator for Hanwha Vision, with trained engineers across the group.
Hanwha Vision Replacement, Licensing and Compliancet
Hanwha enquiries arrive from four directions, and they are asking about different things.
Replacing equipment that is no longer acceptable. This is the largest of the four in the UK. Government departments were instructed in late 2022 to stop deploying Chinese-manufactured surveillance at sensitive sites, with a removal deadline for those sites set for April 2025. That instruction does not bind local authorities, schools or NHS trusts, but NPSA guidance points all public bodies in the same direction, and procurement teams have taken the hint. Given how widely the affected manufacturers were installed across the UK public sector, a lot of organisations are working through an estate they did not choose under rules that did not exist when they bought it. Hanwha is one of the brands they land on.
A licensing bill that keeps arriving. Wisenet WAVE licences are perpetual and priced per camera channel. They do not expire and carry no annual renewal, which puts them on different footing to the subscription and maintenance models most enterprise VMS platforms now run on. Buyers who have been through a renewal cycle or two tend to arrive at this question already informed and already annoyed.
Supply-chain obligations from somewhere else. Organisations with a US parent, a US federal customer, or a supply-chain policy that references NDAA compliance need documented answers rather than assurances. Hanwha manufactures in South Korea and Vietnam and supports NDAA compliance across its product lines, and its Wisenet 7 chipset cameras hold UL Cybersecurity Assurance Program certification.
A VMS decision separate from the cameras. WAVE records from third-party devices over ONVIF, so some enquiries are about the software layer alone, on estates where the cameras are staying put for now.
Wisenet WAVE Licensing and Server Migration
The headline is straightforward. The detail is where estate planning happens.
WAVE licences are per channel and perpetual. Each IP camera connected to a WAVE server needs its own channel licence. Multi-server failover for up to 128 devices is included in the platform rather than licensed separately, which is unusual and worth knowing when you are comparing quotes against platforms that charge for redundancy. A single server supports up to 128 channels and 50 clients, with servers grouped into hives for larger estates.
The part that catches people out is what a licence is attached to.
When a WAVE licence is activated it locks to a 34-digit hardware ID generated from the server it is installed on. Modify that server and the hardware ID changes, which invalidates the licences bound to it. That is not a subscription trap (the licence is still yours), but recovering it means going through Hanwha support rather than clicking a button.
There are two things worth knowing before a hardware refresh. The first is that a licence key can be deactivated and moved a maximum of three times. On a ten-year estate life with a couple of server replacements and one failure, that ceiling is closer than it looks. The second is that the order of operations matters: deactivate the licences before the hardware change, while they are still valid, rather than discovering the problem afterwards.
Neither of these is difficult. Both are the sort of thing that turns a planned server swap into an unplanned week if nobody thought about it in advance.
NDAA Compliance and UK CCTV Procurement
This is worth being precise about, because a lot of the marketing around it is not.
NDAA Section 889 is United States federal procurement law. It restricts federal agencies and their contractors from using specified manufacturers’ equipment. It does not apply to a UK private-sector buyer, and a UK organisation is not obliged to comply with it.
What it has become is a shorthand. UK specifiers writing supply-chain requirements can use NDAA compliance as a proxy for equipment not sourced from the manufacturers the US government has restricted, because it is a defined and testable standard where a home-grown equivalent does not exist. Products manufactured in South Korea also qualify under the US Trade Agreements Act, which matters for organisations bidding into US federal work.
The UK has its own position and it is narrower than people assume. The instruction covering Chinese-manufactured surveillance applies to sensitive government sites. It is guidance rather than law for most public bodies, and it does not reach the private sector at all.
So the honest position is this. If you are a UK organisation with a US parent, a US federal customer, a sensitive government site, or a supply-chain policy that references any of the above, this is a live requirement and you need documentation rather than reassurance. If you are not, it is a useful proxy rather than an obligation, and it should not be the only question you ask about a camera’s security.
Hanwha Vision Installation, Migration and Support
Design and specification
Installation and commissioning
Wisenet WAVE deployment, licensing and server design
Migration and phased replacement of legacy or non-compliant camera estates
Integration with third-party VMS and access control platforms
Maintenance and support, including takeover of existing estates
Health checks and lifecycle planning reports
FAQs About Hanwha Vision
No. WAVE channel licences are perpetual. Once activated they remain valid for the life of the installation with no annual renewal fee.
They need deactivating before the change, not after. Licences are locked to a hardware ID generated from the server, so modifying or replacing it invalidates them. They can be recovered through Hanwha support, but a key can only be moved three times, so a hardware refresh is worth planning as a licensing exercise as well as a hardware one.
Yes. WAVE is built to get the most from Hanwha's onboard analytics but supports third-party devices through ONVIF and auto-discovery.
Hanwha Vision supports NDAA compliance across its product lines and manufactures in South Korea and Vietnam. Products manufactured in South Korea also qualify under the US Trade Agreements Act. Whether that requirement applies to your organisation depends on your customers and your supply-chain policy rather than on UK law.
It depends who you are. The requirement to stop deploying Chinese-manufactured surveillance applies to sensitive government sites. For most public bodies it is guidance rather than law, and for private-sector organisations it is a procurement and risk decision rather than a compliance one. What we would say is that the direction of travel has been consistent for four years, and phased replacement planned over a refresh cycle costs considerably less than replacement under a deadline.
Yes. We regularly take over sites for maintenance, expansion and upgrades.