Plain old telephone service (POTS) lines have served us well but are quickly coming to an end. As this technology becomes obsolete, communication systems that once relied on it – including alarm monitoring – are looking to cellular service as a replacement.
The end of analog lines is near. In December of 2009, AT&T reported to the FCC that is was seeing ways of phasing out ‘Relics of a By-Gone Era.’ Now, seven years later, analog lines have been replaced with digital or cellular devices for most industries. Alarm panels are one of the few remaining devices that regularly rely on analog lines for monitoring. Why though, are we allowing a vital part of our security and life safety systems to rely on outmoded technology?
It’s not just that analog lines are outmoded, the replacement – cellular service – is significantly better. Single path cell systems report into the central station every 5 minutes, versus every 24 hours for a system connected via POTS lines. This dramatically increases the ability of your central monitoring station to discover a problem with your system. Consider this, if your system is on POTS lines it might check in at 2:00 a.m. If your system then experiences a problem and shuts down at 2:04 a.m., your system monitoring station will not know there is a problem until 2:00 a.m. the next morning. That’s almost a full 24 hours that you are unprotected! However, if your system is on a cellular monitoring service the problem will be discovered at 2:05 a.m., allowing your provider to notify you almost immediately of a problem and decrease system downtime.
In addition to better system monitoring, cellular monitoring also costs less than POTS lines monitoring. As you can see from the analysis below, cell monitoring provides better technology at a lower cost.
| Traditional Monitoring Costs + Business Lines | Typical Savings with Cellular Monitoring |
| 2 Year Agreement Costs = $3,024.00 | 2 Year Agreement Savings = $1,101.00 |
| 3 Year Agreement Costs = $4,536.00 | 3 Year Agreement Savings = $1,953.00 |
| 4 Year Agreement Costs = $6,048.00 | 4 Year Agreement Savings = $2,817.00 |
| 5 Year Agreement Costs = $7,560.00 | 5 Year Agreement Savings = $3,705.00 |
| 6 Year Agreement Costs = $9,072.00 | 6 Year Agreement Savings = $4,653.00 |
Save money and improve your asset protection with cell monitoring.
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