Security Guards, Alarm Companies Object to Australia's National Fiber Network

natecochrane writes "Australia's proposed high-speed National Broadband Network has put the fate of more than a million security alarm systems that alert Australians to fire, home invasion, break-in and medical emergency in limbo pending the building of a simulated test bed next year. A group that represents security guards and those that supply monitored alarms has concerns that ranged from the inconvenient ('angry customers woken by their alarm systems beeping' during a nightly NBN upgrade) to life-threatening in the case of medical alarms, its CEO said. 'Under the fibre-optic system there won't be that redundancy and backup [from the copper phone system]. So if it goes down no one will know,' ASIAL CEO Bryan de Caires said."

Comments

Really about kickbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more about the kick backs the alarm monitoring companies get from the Telecom providers for using their service for alarm monitoring rather than any technical reason. Thousands of homes, at least one phone call a day. A few cents kicked back to the security company. A license to print money - no wonder they are complaining.

Re:Yeah, because

[MichaelSmith]

More to the point the copper network is noisy as hell. It used to be that you would see fire engines in the Melbourne CBD every couple of hours or so because there were so many false positives from the fire alarms, and a lot of that came down to the phone system.

So its gotten much better lately but re-engineering is well over due IIRC.