INDUSTRY
Life after PSTN Monitoring Wade Coneybeer, Alarm Watch General Manager and NZSA Board Member, discusses the phasing out of the PSTN and what it means for alarm unit selection. After decades of a love-hate relationship between Security Alarms and the Public Switched Telephone Network, it finally approaches the end.
Spark announced in June 2018 that it had already removed 62 of the 482 Automated Telephone Switches and set the goal to remove two more each week for the 12-month period that followed. There are varied opinions out there, but the consensus is that your best bet is to move your monitored alarms off the aging copper network, sooner, rather than later. This isn’t a new predicament, our industry was first invited to a briefing in 2007 by the then Telecom, warning that the PSTN was going to be phased out. Most industry vocalists have been ringing the warning bells since that meeting, so you are more than likely to already have your options in play. Apart from radio transmission, one of the first options was to utilise a phone port on the customer’s modem or install a VOIP adapter to emulate the DTMF tones, but this was not always successful due to traditional alarm receivers being very unforgiving when it comes to the tones they require to successfully exchange information. These connections infamously work one day, and not the next. Soon after, and still to this day, came a slow wave of addon modules. Retrofitting alarms with a device that neither replicates DTMF tones nor utilises the traditional alarm receiver, but rather works by picking up the message from the alarm’s dialler, converting it to data and sending it via the customer’s internet or the Cellular Data Network.
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NZSM
Wade Coneybeer, Alarm Watch General Manager
IP units that connect the alarm directly to the customer’s modem were very popular, initially. On first thought, this appeared to be the cheapest option as you didn’t have to pay for a SIM card, but it didn’t take long to work out that it came at a higher cost unless the customer had a managed network. Integrators were doing repeat visits to customers to get connections back online and Monitoring Operators were hassling clients about lost connections, all because the customer
June/July 2019
