Real video intercom
Guards start a WebRTC call from a gate tablet. Residents get one-way video of the entrance and two-way audio — the resident’s own camera is never switched on, so the privacy boundary runs one way only.
Gatehouse
The gate calls you. You see who is there. You decide.
Gatehouse replaces the shouted phone call at the gate with a real video intercom. Guards start a call from a gate tablet; the resident’s phone rings natively, shows one-way video of the entrance with two-way audio, and entry is approved or rejected with a single tap — from the kitchen or from another country.
- WebRTC video intercom
- Native call handling
- Resident & guard apps
- CCTV bridging
- Incident reporting
Pilot deployment Built for a 700-home, three-gate estate. Pilot stage.
700homes
served by the deployment it was designed around
3gates
with kiosk-mode tablets and live call routing
Audioonly
the resident’s own camera is never used — by design
0exposed cameras
CCTV bridged locally, never published to the internet
01 / The problem
Every estate gate runs on a phone call nobody can verify.
A visitor arrives. The guard phones the house. Someone who may or may not be the resident says “let them in.” There is no picture, no record, and no way to tell an expected guest from a confident stranger.
Estates that do install intercoms usually get a fixed handset by the front door — useless when the resident is at work, and a second network to maintain. The CCTV that already exists sits in a separate system that nobody watches, and is often exposed to the internet by whoever installed it.
Gatehouse fixes the verification gap and the exposure gap at the same time: live video to the resident’s own phone wherever they are, and estate cameras bridged through a local gateway that never opens a port to the outside world.
02 / In operation
What the team actually looks at.
The shape below is true to the real product. The numbers are not — these are illustrative values, never customer data.
Gatehouse gate 2 / live live
Calls today 212
Avg. answer 6.4s target <10s
Cameras up 18/18
Open incidents 1
- Visitor · House 214 Guard tablet, gate 2 · resident answered approved
- Delivery · House 87 Two-way audio · package left at gate approved
- Unknown caller · House 341 Resident rejected · logged with video reference rejected
- SOS · House 502 Raised from resident app · guards dispatched escalated
Illustrative interface with sample data — no resident information is shown.
03 / Capabilities
What it does, in detail.
8 capability areas, each built because the operation breaks without it.
Calls that behave like calls
Native CallKit and Telecom integration means the resident’s phone rings on the lock screen like a normal call — not a notification they will miss.
Approve or reject in one tap
Entry decisions are explicit, attributed to a named resident, and written to an audit log with the call recording reference.
Guard tablet in kiosk mode
A locked-down Android app at each gate: resident lookup, call initiation, visitor logging and shift handover, with nothing else reachable on the device.
CCTV bridged, not exposed
An on-site edge gateway pulls existing camera streams and republishes them internally only. Cameras never receive an inbound connection from the internet.
Incident reporting
Incidents raised by guards or the security desk, attributed to the person who raised them and held in the same append-only record as the entry decisions.
Resident and household directory
Households, occupants, vehicles and authorised contacts, managed by estate administration rather than a guard’s notebook.
Administration portal
Gate configuration, guard accounts, resident onboarding, call history and incident review in one web console.
04 / Surface area
19 modules, one system.
Breadth is only an asset when the parts share a data model. Every module here reads and writes the same records — there is no export step between them.
- Gate tablets
- Resident app
- Call signalling
- WebRTC media
- Native call UI
- Visitor log
- Entry decisions
- Household directory
- Occupancies
- Incidents
- CCTV edge gateway
- Camera health
- Security desk
- Announcements
- Supervisor
- Device binding
- Admin TOTP MFA
- Admin portal
- Append-only audit
05 / Architecture
Real-time media is a different engineering problem. It is treated as one.
A NestJS API handles call signalling and access tokens; media flows over a selective forwarding unit rather than through the API. Mobile clients are Flutter with native call-integration modules on each platform. An on-premise edge gateway handles camera ingestion so estate CCTV stays on the estate.
- L1 Gate tablet Flutter Android app in kiosk mode — resident lookup and call initiation.
- L2 Resident app Flutter iOS and Android with native CallKit / Telecom call handling.
- L3 Signalling API NestJS REST and WebSocket layer driving an explicit call state machine.
- L4 Media layer WebRTC SFU for low-latency one-way video and two-way audio.
- L5 Edge gateway On-site media server bridging existing CCTV with a health agent reporting camera status.
06 / Integrations
Built to connect, not to be a silo.
Third parties are first-class parts of the architecture, isolated behind stable internal contracts so any one of them can be replaced without touching the core.
Existing CCTV
Standards-based camera ingestion from installed estate systems, bridged locally.
Mobile platforms
Native iOS CallKit and Android Telecom so intercom calls behave like phone calls.
Push delivery
High-priority push to wake a device and ring it even when the app is closed.
Deny-by-default media
Media tokens fail closed: if the media layer is unconfigured, every endpoint refuses rather than issuing a placeholder token.
Residential security
Want Gatehouse for your operation?
We can walk you through the live platform, talk about how it maps onto how you work today, and be honest about where it does not fit.