With a market penetration that has already reached 15-20 percent of homeowners in numerous areas of the country, Voice over IP service (VoIP) has quickly become a major player in the telecommunications industry. With the announcement from AT&T that it expected to have service delivering VoIP available to consumers in the top 100 markets by the first quarter of 2004, the issue of how this service affects burglar and fire alarm systems is crucial to comprehend.
VoIP is the means by which voice or any analog data is encoded “packetized” for transport over an internet connection, then decoded at the other end to restore the data into its analog form. For maximum fidelity, a broadband connection of some kind is strongly desired. This service is currently being offered by hundreds of companies, including cable providers, telephone companies, internet service providers, etc. The perceived benefit to your customer is the ability to pay a very low flat rate for their telephone service and in many instances receive substantial discounts when packaging it with other service offerings.
Utilizing VoIP service, there are four distinct methods of communication: computer to computer; computer to telephone; telephone to computer; and telephone to telephone.
According to some industry experts, VoIP does not allow the alarm panel to seize the phone line to signal the central station, and does not work during power failures. It also has been stated that the ability to monitor the line is lost, because DC voltage no longer exists. DC voltage tells the digital alarm communicator transmitter line monitor that a telephone line is in place. Cablevision, one of the nation's largest cable television providers with a customer base of three million, puts it in plain terms: “Cablevision does not guarantee that Optimum Voice will function as the connection between your home security system and/or emergency medical alert system and central monitoring services.”
“Following some additional studies and testing, it has been confirmed that timing, coding and decoding issues with some VoIP providers are causing problems with the Contact ID format,” according to Lou Fiore, Chairman of the Central Station Alarm Association's Alarm Industry Communications Committee and Standards Committee. “It appears that the older formats, such as three by one and four by two, seem to work fine. The SIA format also appears to be unaffected.” Additional data has yet to be released regarding more than 200 formats that currently exist in the monitoring marketplace.
In addition to Cablevision, companies such as Vonage, a broadband phone service provider, suggest keeping a P.O.T.S. line for the alarm system. What this means for the end-user are two distinct costs: the monthly expense for the P.O.T.S. line and monthly monitoring charges, and the monthly charge for VoIP service. What might have appeared at first glance to be substantial savings for the consumer could potentially result in increased costs in the long term. IP telephony has a number of issues that still must be resolved to become a more effective means of communication on a larger scale. Although it will take some time, it is likely that all circuit-switched networks that alarm systems currently operate through will be replaced with packet-switching technology. IP telephony makes sense for the future in terms of both economics and infrastructure requirements. It's time to make your customers aware of the potential effect on their alarm systems.