May 4, 2011
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Question
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Greetings,
It seems that everyone appreciates this forum as do I. It is a great medium to communicate regarding some issues that affect us all.
I am writing because I have some liability concerns that I have not heard addressed here. The panel manufacturers especially Honeywell seem to have drawn a line in the sand disavowing any responsibility when I use their communicator with a non POTS medium to communicate an alarm. Because they tell me that their dialer product is made for POTS and that is what it works on, by implication if I knowingly monitor an alarm any other way, then the responsibility for the results rest with me.
Where I am in Canada, we have the typical VOIP service providers and we know that these are a very poor choice for alarm communications. We would not consider such phone service as an option at all.
However, all long distance phone communications are digitized so that although it is extremely sophisticated, long distance communication it is still essentially a VOIP communication.
There is probably not a central station out there that is not using digital lines to feed their receivers, again essentially VOIP.
Telephone communications is strictly controlled in Canada where I am, which pretty much eliminates all but very sophisticated communication players. We have 2 choices for telephone and cable service, one provides phone internet and cable service over a twisted pair, and the other over coax. The service from both is of such a high quality that we cannot discern a difference apart from standby time in a power outage situation.
What brings the issue to the forefront is that we are losing some self-tests and the digitization of our analogue communication is being blamed for the lost data. When this happens the panel’s event buffer records the test, and the panel is not in fail to communicate trouble, and yet the station is not recording a test and therefore generates a “Fail to Test” alarm.
We are not aware of losing any ‘alarm’ signals but we are monitoring the situation as closely as we can and with all of this attention being given to the issue, we are not aware of a common denominator with these signal losses. Contact ID and SIA seem to suffer equally. The coax and twisted pair service provider seem to have the same number of lost signals.
Fortunately we now have some strictly digital solutions going forward, but that is no help at all for our existing book of accounts. With the manufacturer stating that their dialers were made for POTS and that they do not support digital communications, we are feeling hung out to dry.
If the manufacturer has let it be known that their product is strictly a POTS product, and we continue to install and/or service it, thus ignoring their warning, what is our liability exposure? What is the solution especially when we consider the fact that our central stations use digital phone lines?
Tod Smith - President
Shadow Alarms Ltd.
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Answer
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The technical issues I leave to others. Although there is certainly a trend to move to VoIP communication I believe that most in the alarm industry will still hold that POTS is the more reliable and better communication mode. That is likely to change as VoIP technology improves. Not long ago VoIP could not be used for fire. I believe it is now acceptable to AHJs. Having said that however, the Standard Alarm Contracts and the Disclaimer Notice still warn subscriber about using VoIP. POTS is simply more reliable and acceptable.