TELEPHONE SERVICE AND ALARM SYSTEMS

In recent years we have seen more and more people changing their phone service from the traditional land lines offered by the phone company to telephone service offered by the cable TV company or telephone service over an internet connection (VOIP). These are great ways of saving you money for phone service and long distance charges. Alternate phone service can however be a problem for your alarm system. Your alarm system uses your phone service to send alarm signals to the central monitoring station. In order for these signals to get through certain conditions must be met.

1. The physical connection of your phone service to the alarm system must be correct. When an

alarm system is installed the main feed for the phone lines are first run through the alarm

system and then to your house telephones.

When you change your telephone service, the location of the main feed for the telephone

service is changed. If the telephone installer does not rewire the service correctly your alarm

system may not be able to get signals to the central station under all conditions as it was designed.

2. In a power failure you will still have phone service almost indefinitely if you have phone service from

the phone company. If your phone service is from a cable TV provider or Internet service provider

you need to have a backup power source that will supply power to the phone service hardware.

Some cable TV and DSL phone modems have batteries built in but many of them do not. Also the

batteries may be weak or dead. If you have VOIP phone service you have to power the cable or

DSL modem as well as any routers or computers that are part of the phone service hardware.

3. VOIP phones have more problems. An alarm system is designed to send its signals over an analog

phone line. To transmit emergency signals properly using VOIP, the signal must be converted to

digital, then converted again to analog. It is during this conversion that problems develop. Usually the

signals arrive at the central monitoring station with errors, or sometimes not at all.

VOIP services tend to be more prone to “mysterious” technical issues and dropped calls. Your alarm

panel may be communicating vital data to your monitoring station, and a dropped call will obviously

interfere with this. Or, your alarm’s signal may go through without a problem on one attempt, but will

fail on another for no apparent reason.

4. Alarm systems use your phone lines to send emergency signals to the central monitoring station.

This is by no means the best way to get the signals there. It is however the least expensive way.

An intruder may cut a phone wire or a cable wire outside your home thus disabling your telephone

service. We suggest all alarms systems have a radio backup transmitter installed.

SOME SOLUTIONS FOR THE ABOVE PROBLEMS

Call us to inspect and test your physical telephone line connections to the alarm system.

We’ll also test your entire system.

Test your telephone service in a power failure. Unplug your cable modem or DSL modem and

computer equipment to do this test and see if your phone still works.

You won’t know however how long it will continue to work.

Your alarm system has backup batteries. And the system self tests them every 10 minutes.

Don’t use VOIP or cable phone service for your alarm system. Use a phone company supplied land line. Protect your phone line outside and shield the box and wires from tampering.

Ask us about other ways to insure the emergency signal gets through.

We offer backup radio transmitters that will almost guarantee the alarm signals will get through.

The backup radios have their own battery backup and do self-tests and diagnostics. They are

located inside the protected area so intruders outside can’t cut any wires. Reasonably priced!

Please consider the solutions outlined here. Our mutual goal is to insure

the emergency signals get through when they are needed. back to Keller Alarm Company