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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."
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...
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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...
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.
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.
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
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
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.
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).
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.
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.
...I guess, somehow (lol), using fiber precludes using wireless as a backup too?
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