Security Sales & Integration February 2022 - 58

EXECUTIVE DECISIONS
Monitoring Matters by Morgan Hertel
The War on POTS
By its very
nature, VoIP is
highly resilient
and adaptive
when utilized
for actual voice
calls, but it's
not friendly to
alarm traffi c
running over it.
▶ WHEN I FIRST STARTED IN THIS industry
in 1979, a small family-run alarm company
in Southern California was just starting to
monitor digital dialers - up until then, most
were direct-connects of various types, along
with tape dialers. Some of these went directly
to various police departments, others went into
the company's central station.
For most monitoring companies, their reach
was limited to a small geographic area because
of the limitations of copper circuits. When the
digital dialer appeared on the market in the
mid-1970s, not only did geographic limitations
go away, but the cost of expensive copper
circuits disappeared, as well. Th ese were major
changes that sparked a completely new way of
marketing and installing monitored systems.
Th e technology used for digital dialers was incredibly
simple: simple tones were transmitted,
then counted to determine the account number
and the code being sent. Th e early stuff was so
slow that most technicians could listen in and
decode it themselves by just counting the beeps.
Later on, DTMF (dual tone multifrequency,
known as touchtone) was used to send signals,
along with various FSK (frequency shift keying)
modes, but all of this was designed to be sent
across analog phone lines that, to be honest,
had pretty good fi delity.
Some of you might recall the marketing slogan
of " Our network is so good you can hear a
pin drop. " Th at's now replaced with the slogan
of " Th e network with the least dropped calls. "
Obviously, the technology has greatly changed,
but consumer expectations have changed, as
well. People are generally used to jittery, latency-fi
lled cellphone calls, and having calls
dropped midsentence.
As the need for traditional landlines has deMorgan
Hertel is Vice
President of Technology
and Innovation for Rapid
Response Monitoring.
58
creased and the appetite for high-speed networking
greatly increased, the telecom industry
has been converting almost all voice calls to run
over high-speed IP networks instead of traditional
analog/TDM (time division multiplexing)
phone networks. Th at is commonly called
voice over IP, or VoIP, for short, and it allows for
a much easier and fl exible platform for carriers
Security Sales & Integration FEBRUARY 2022
to transport and route calls.
Since voice calls are now becoming less and
less of their core business, it's become a business
necessity to move in that direction. In fact,
that is so much so that carriers are either not
renewing TDM circuits or they are increasing
costs for TDM circuits and switching toll-free
to factors of 10 times or more. Basically, they
are making it unaff ordable to continue using
dial-up on TDM.
Moving voice calls to IP networks has also
created a number of new business models. Now,
we not only have the named endpoint carriers
to work with, we also have interexchange carriers,
sometimes called " tandem " or " least cost
routing " carriers. Most of these will not be easily
identifi ed, and it is not possible, normally,
to work directly with them when a problem
occurs. Virtually every call placed to a toll-free
number will utilize at least one interexchange
carrier, but, unfortunately, every " hop " adds a
little bit of latency and jitter, and, all too often,
so many hops occur that the latency is too much
to overcome, and the alarm call fails.
I could easily write a whole book on VoIP and
why problems exist, but it's time to understand
that continuing to use dial-up for alarm transmissions
is just a bad idea. In stating that, I am
at the same time keenly aware of rural situations
where choices might be limited as to what's
available, but getting cellular and broadband to
rural areas is getting better, and that situation
will diminish over time.
What is important to our industry is for
communications to monitoring centers be
consistently reliable, complete and clear in order
for security and fi re alarms to function as
required. Th ere are so many issues with using
VoIP, but one of the most frustrating issues is,
ironically, that the various issues are so inconsistent:
one day it's working just fi ne, the next
day it fails and in ways over which we have no
control. By its very nature, VoIP is highly resilient
and adaptive when utilized for actual voice
calls, but it's not friendly to alarm traffi c running
over it.
Modern monitoring centers have invested
heavily in redundant systems where virtually
every system, circuit, power source, carrier, etc.
is deployed in pairs. As an industry, we have
incredibly reliable and consistent services, but
while dial-up worked reliably from the 1970s
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