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VoIP and Home Security Systems Don't Get Along
coondoggie writes "Here is a story about consumer VoIP services that can cause your home security alarm system to malfunction or not work at all. There have been problems with customer phone systems in Canada who were using Primus but Vonage customers in the U.S have complained too. A number of sites have popped up offering suggestions to help deal with the problem."
I don't mean to be mean, but home broadband connections and VoIP services do not meet the same standards of reliability and uptime that your landline is generally required to meet.
Whether it is 911 service or your home's alarm system, do you want to trust your home broadband connection for emergencies?
It smells because there are easy solutions to the problems. First of all, you can supply backup power to your ATA and not have to worry.
Secondly you should wire your setup as RJ31X so the alarm system can cut in and take control.
Thirdly - you can set your bandwidth so that fax and modem signals will work. Better yet, how come no alarm company has an IP based monitoring setup? Be pretty simple to do with VPN's, etc.
Finally the E-911 issue was resolved a long time ago. I have full E-911 service through Vonage.
All this leads me to believe that ILEC's are behind these stories. They're losing business left and right to less expensive VoIP carriers. And Verizon for one is in a particularly bad spot, their little fiber build out isn't generating the returns they expected.
Is anyone (here) surprised by this? It seems painfully obvious to me, that most such services obviously wouldn't work. That this guy wasn't notified BY THE SECURITY SERVICE that his alarm system wasn't functioning for over a year, speaks volumes about how useless that service really is.
It's only too easy to cut a POTS line, or tie it up by dialing-in to it, which is exactly what any competent burglar will do... Maybe with a (pre-paid?) cell-based service, your alarm will have a fighting chance, but not a lot even then.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
works great, doesn't require any phone line, and has gone down in price recently.
POTS lines are no longer needed.
I dunno. Before plugging my VOIP service into my home circuit, I of course had to disconnect my home curcuit from the phone company. I can tell you it was very easy; I just opened a plastic box on the side of my house and unplugged it. If you're worried about "bad guys," a cellphone might be better.
In type type of general emergency likely to kill cellphones (or Internet), I don't think you have great odds of contacting the police and getting a swift response anyways. You're worried about the Internet as a shared bandwidth link? Well 911 and the police are shared resources, too. I can tell you plenty of folks called 911 from the WTC, or when New Orleans flooded, and it didn't help them much.
If you're worried about a random Internet or cellphone outage at the same time as a random burglary, go ahead, but for me personally that's on the other side of "lightning strike."
Sounds like a modem attempting to dial out in your burglar alarm will run into problems unless your Voip gateway is configured to pass calls to the PSTN. The GSM codecs used by voip are going to seriously break any attempt at transmitting data even at horribly low bitrates.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Most houses have access to the POTS from the outside. It is just as easy for the "bad guy" to snip the POTS line as it is for them to shut off the power. Given that batteries on alarm systems are well known, it seems more likely that the "bad guy" would go the route of snipping phone lines over cutting power. Of course if the alarm is set to call over VOIP, or even as a TCP/IP, the "bad guy" would have to worry about cutting the phone line, the cable line, AND knocking the satellite dish out of alignment.
Caveat: some of their links were broken the last time I checked. Makes you wonder.
Obligatory disclaimer: I've just hit their website looking for a similar solution; not a customer (yet).
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Used to work at an ISP that did VoIP (wirelessly in fact). If you could tweak the baud rate on your security system and drop it down to say 1200bps, it would typically work. It was still fairly hit and miss though. Add to that that many customers had no clue how to do this and alarm companies didn't care enough to try and help them.
Modem-type communications expect timing to be near exact (something the PSTN can guarantee) and just don't work well with the random delays (caused by 'net conditions, jitter buffering, etc) that are inherent with VoIP. T38 helps with faxing, but any sort of modem connection is going to cause problems.
We made sure our customers knew that burglar alarms were _not_ something we supported over VoIP. In fact it's a downright silly idea tying your home protection in with your Internet connection in most cases anyways. You can often get a phone line specifically for burglar alarms for less than you'd pay for a line used for talking on as well, so this is typically what we'd advise customers to do.