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

Yeah, because

[CrashandDie]

The system we've used for (nearly) decades where when a system stops responding, we know there's some kind of failure, and we send out alerts is absolutely impossible to utilise with fibre...

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.

Re:Yeah, because

[MichaelSmith]

Incidentally the European standard emergency number 112 is very easy to pulse dial when joining cables.

Telstra techs here in .au once described their network of pipes as a secondary storm water system. One wet day I got called out for a traffic signal fault. Our computer room was flooding from water flowing up out of the Telstra pipe, across the floor and under our false floor, triggering a flood detector.

Telstra guy found a pit down hill from our building, and finding it dry tugged really hard on a cable. The resulting flood in the pipe stopped the water flooding our building.

Re:Yeah, because

[Shakrai]

There was water leaking into the conduit between my house (in California) and the local box.

My favorite POTS story involves an old woman whose phone stops ringing. She still knows that she's getting incoming calls though because her dog barks whenever someone calls her. One of her kids reports the problem to the phone company and a tech is sent out to troubleshoot the problem. Turns out to be a grounding issue -- the ground wire got separated from the ground rod. Why was the dog barking when calls came in? She chained the dog to the outside d-marc and the chain was in contact with what was left of the ground wire. The poor dog was being electrocuted every time somebody called her.....

Re:Yeah, because

[Shakrai]

most junkies are in and out in 5 minutes flat

Not if you shoot them when you break into your house.....

Re:Yeah, because

[GrpA]

This is Australia... I think you mean "Not if you throw your boomerang at them as they break into your house..."

Different culture.

GrpA

But on he other hand

[MichaelSmith]

The advantage of copper that that devices can run off it but lots of devices can run for weeks on batteries now, and moving to fibre doesn't really change the way communications are done that much. Alarms can probably be cellular now anyway.

Re:But on he other hand

[NJRoadfan]

I have Verizon FiOS here in the US. Verizon claims the battery backup is good for up to 8 hours. The ONT goes into a low power mode when on battery where only POTS is available for use. If you need TV/internet access or longer POTS backup, you can connect the ONT to a plain old UPS without any problems.

Actually great for these companies!

[dowlingw]

I would have thought the monitoring companies would have loved the NBN, it means they can ditch large, space and power consuming analog PSTN gear with power and space efficient routers. As far as saying theres no monitoring, thats BS. If you're offering a Layer 2 wholesale product, you can see whether or not there are tunnels established for that client, and if the tunnel is up - you can poll to see if the device is reachable. Also a win for alarm system companies, who now get a chance to make ludicrous profits on installing entirely new alarm systems country-wide. Sounds like a knee-jerk reaction that if given attention might actually do these parties more harm than good...

Re:Actually great for these companies!

[Rogerborg]

They already make ludicrous profits from installing the current POTS systems, which then sit and do nothing for 99.9% of their life. What they don't want is to have to eat the investment in coming up with a whole new system that can also sit and do nothing for 99.9% of the time.

Eh?

[Nursie]

1. If the alarms beep during network upgrades MAKE BETTER ALARMS

Hell, if the current models somehow will do this if/when NBN comes around then you get to make money selling people upgrades surely?

2. WTF? No way of knowing when the system is down?

I can see that if some systems rely on power-over-POTS then there's a downside to getting fibre to the home, but seriously, I would have thought these industry types should be rubbing their greasy hands in glee at being able to offer upgrade services.

Re:Eh?

[jpatters]

My phone service is fiber to the home, and they installed a box inside that has a UPS battery to supply power to the legacy phone hardware, and to keep it running through power outages. My guess is that the alarm hardware will have to include a bigger UPS because they probably draw more power than an ordinary telephone headset.

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:Really about kickbacks

[MichaelSmith]

I don't know about Australia, but here most people pay a flat rate for phone service. They don't pay per call. So what incentive would telecoms have to give kickbacks to alarm companies?

Correct me if in fact in Australia customers pay per phone call or per minute.

Charge is per call for local calls. Time charges on non-local calls. Back when I worked on traffic signals we could get hard wired leased lines for $300 AUD a year from Telstra within a single exchange area. Our gear was located to minimise the cost of the leased lines. That was two actual strings of conducting copper, point to point. You don't see that these days.

Re:Really about kickbacks

[guruntus]

Most people here pay a charge per land line call 15c, 20c or 25c depending on their "bundle". Copper Land line calls - the ones in question - in general are not timed. When the alarm dials out on the land line, it costs 20c or so to the owner of the alarm - not the alarm monitoring company. If the alarm dials out once every day at say 2am. That's roughly $6 a month per monitored alarm to the telco. This also assumes it is one call per day - could be more. The alarm monitoring company negotiates a deal with the telco, to use them and only them. The telco takes the $6+ a month from every person with a monitored alarm and feeds back a few cents (or dollars) to the alarm monitoring company. Over a few thousand houses (or 10's of thousands houses) this is a nice little earner for the alarm companies. Under the NBN, this all ends.

Re:Really about kickbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

I am Aussie and local calls cost anywhere from 15c on up depending on which carrier and plan you are with (there are some higher end plans that give you unlimited local calls though)

Charge is per call for local calls.

Most people here pay a charge per land line call 15c, 20c or 25c depending on their "bundle".

Hey Australia! The 20th century called and wants it's horribly antiquated billing practices back.

What a crock of shit.....

[bernywork]

This has to be one of the most bullshit statements I've had the displeasure of reading.

There is two things wrong with this, the POTS copper system ISN'T redundant, they have a single pair of copper going onto a single card in an exchange (CO). They do have an SLA that they have to have 99.99% uptime, and if Telstra / Optus / whoever don't keep the copper line up they get fined by the government (ACA?). Secondly, ANYONE who wants redundancy can get a GSM mobile / copper wire system. A LOT of businesses have to replace their alarm systems every two or three years for insurance reasons (The insurance companies sometimes even pay for the upgrade) and a number of businesses already have this setup. If they have to go to NBN eventually (The copper system isn't dissapearing anytime soon) they will have a copper to VoIP setup with a GSM backup, it's not exactly hard.

There is so much inertia behind the copper system that it will take a LONG time to decomission, (50 years?) I don't see the reason why they would have to upgrade anything immediately.

Yes, there is medical requirements and a lot of dependency on the existing setup, but the new network won't be finished for 10 years, let alone the old one being decomissioned....

Berny

Watchdog?

[sheepzilla]

Why not have some system that sits there sending a message every 30 seconds, and warn when it stops....

Re:bullshit-o-meter explodes, news at 11

[c0lo]

man, what a load of bullshit... these people are paid by someone that doesn't want this network for the future to see the light of day... lemme guess... telstra :-)

Nope. They are paid by the customers... to do nothing at all, most of the time and to call a mobile if a light gets on
I reckon the inertia in doing nothing is very hard to overcome (don't attribute to malice what can be reasonable explained by stupidity).

Re:Is 3g the answer? - no

[Anonymous Coward]

For mission critical or life threatening services a simple 3g service would provide the necesacery backup, or just dual FO connections pointed at different NTU's on seperate networks.

HIGH AVAILABILITY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!!!

Simple redundant comm paths might get you as far as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation 99% availability or, with some engineer finagling, even 99.9% availability. That means that on average such a system might be non-working anywhere from 8.5 hours to more than 3.5 days in the course of a year.

The copper telephone network systems requires a level of availability that defined the term "carrier grade" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_grade, aka 99.999% available. That means they might be non-working for little more than 5 minutes during an entire year.

That's a huge difference.

Power from the POTS but a stupid argument anyhow

[inflex]

They're likely worried about the power supplied by the telco on the copper pair - however any robber who has the brains to kill the house power probably knows to kill the POTS landline too.

If they (security people) are -really- worried then they'd have made sure that like most other systems they have their own battery-backup built in for just these sorts of situations ( not to mention the whole 3G/Wireless backups which would make more sense in order to eliminate the whole cut-wire silence issue ).

All in all, another pointless beat up by people who probably don't want their cozy world of routine changed (better put them with RIAA/MPAA etc).

People misunderstanding redundancy claim

[brunes69]

People on here are misunderstanding the claim of redundancy.

What the guy is talking about is with the POTS, your telco has giant battery and generator warehouses that can run the entire city grid for 48+ hours in the event of power outage. Normally, this is not the case with fibre, especially at all of the junctions.

Re:People misunderstanding redundancy claim

[JSBiff]

You know, one thing I've not understood for years is why the Telco can't simply run fiber cables that have a couple copper conductors physically joined to the fiber, for power? Very often I hear this argument that copper lines can be used to provide enough power that the phone works even when main power is down. With digital, the argument goes, power goes down, you can't use the phone even if the fiber line is perfectly fine and the telco has power at their equipment.

So, it seems the obvious solution is to bring some (low) power in along-side of the fiber cable. Then, whatever piece of equipment terminates the fiber cable at the residence, can distribute that power to the house (e.g. if it ties into a copper analog phone cable in the house that a POTS phone plug into, the power can be channeled out onto the analog plug of the fiber router, and if there is an ethernet network hooked up to the router, the router could channel power also onto the network (Power-over-Ethernet), so any devices which can be powered via PoE (like a properly designed alarm system, WiFi AP, VoIP phones, etc) will still be powered. You could further supplement this setup by having a UPS attached to the fiber router, so if for some reason power from both telco and mains was cut, you'd have a small reserve of battery power (say a few hours) to keep your home network going.

Unfortunately, I don't hear any noise in the telecoms industry to implement such a thing.

PING

[dsstao]

There are so many examples of single-point-of-failure scenarios that we already have a solution for it - heartbeat monitoring (PINGs). The alarm/security company sends out heartbeat checks every 2-5 seconds, the device at the customer's home responds. If it doesn't, an alert pops up. It's clean, simple, and is done probably millions of times a day already. Is this article serious that people are legitimately worried that no one will know when a line goes down? And, for someone else who mentioned it - have a cellular backup... if the pings fail, try to get to it through a secondary (cellular) network. If that doesn't work, an alert pops up and a call goes to the homeowner asking if their house hasn't exploded, taking the security equipment with it or something.

lol

[Charliemopps]

I work for a large telco and coincidentally monitor alarms all day long. Our sites that are on copper go down constantly. Every lightening storm knocks out hundreds of customers. We always joke when a site switches to fiber that we'll not be talking to them anymore. Sometimes we call the local techs to say goodbye. Why? Because once a site switches to fiber they NEVER go down again. It's like they vanish off of our alarm maps. The simple fact of the matter is that the only situations that can drop the fiber connection would most definitely drop any copper connection in the area as well... major router going down, cable cut, etc... This redundancy crap they are talking about just shows how little they know about how it works. The REAL reason they object to this is obvious, I've seen first hand how their "alarms" work. The more sophisticated alarms actually have some 1990's era modem inside that dials into the alarm company to tell them theirs trouble. This requires a standard pots line. I've seen these lines go down for weeks before the alarm company runs a standard test and realizes it doesn't work anymore and calls us. Then I find out their customer didn't know what the line was for so they requested a disconnect 3 weeks ago. Great reliability from your security company there... Then there is the OLD SCHOOL way of doing things. The alarm company just uses our copper pair as an Open/Closed circuit. A simple smoke alarm that opens the circuit when it goes off, or, and this was my favorite, the water alarm. The cable pair would end with 2 contacts that were held apart by an aspirin. (no I'm not kidding) if there was flooring and the water got too high, the aspirin would dissolve, the contacts would touch and the circuit would complete and set off the remote alarm. Once ever 3 months they would call me to test and replace the aspirin. If everything switches to fiber, their $2 alarm systems would have to switch to something that could work on fiber that'd cost $100+. That's what they're concerned about.

so...

[HappySam]

so replacing a single system with another single system means that the first system is no longer there. yes i follow so far... where does the problem with reduced redundancy come in? 1(copper)-1(copper)+1(fiber)=1(fiber) not sure I get this line of reasoning...

Strange, my current system has a wireless backup..

[Assmasher]

...I guess, somehow (lol), using fiber precludes using wireless as a backup too?

Re:Geez, I'm scared now!

[mgblst]

Some of us, you know, actually leave the house. That is what most people use alarms for. Most people don't need a gun to defend themselves in Australia, they are not that weak.

Dependency on POTS lines?!?

[Demonslayer1337]

I live in the US and work as the Manager for a Central Station for alarm companies.
I know for a fact that all that bitching about moving to fiber is really just an excuse
from the security industry to stick to old technology and never have to worry about
changing with the times. Burglary, medical, and even fire systems monitored over
phone lines are not dependable anyway. If a burglar cut you phone line and your alarm
system has no other form of communication then you are left without any protection anyway.

There is no excuse for the industry to keep from planning out a long term switch to
full wireless systems that provide full data transport reliably and highly encrypted.
Granted the industry can not support moving the entire infrastructure to wireless or
any alternate form of communication given such a short time period to do it in.