Who gives the best after hours fault service?

Forums › One New Zealand (including Vodafone, WxC, Farmside) › Who gives the best after hours fault service?

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sbiddle

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#1221849 25-Jan-2015 14:37

Wadec: Need the pots for alarm systems

POTS lines for alarms is now a dead end solution. IP offers so many advantages it's now the preferred option by good installers.

Wadec

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#1221856 25-Jan-2015 14:49

Sorry Guys, we are a monitoring centre so need the POTS lines until the customers upgrade their alarms...

quickymart

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#1221956 25-Jan-2015 18:07

I think some sort of managed service would be most suitable for you then. But (as the others have said) it won't come cheap.

jnimmo

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#1222240 26-Jan-2015 09:25

ISDN may give you a more reliable connection than POTS while still working with alarms.
Not totally sure whether you use the analog lines both for the incoming alarm status updates as well as phoning customers, but you could move to VoIP for outgoing/incoming voice calls and have the alarms going through to ISDN/POTS.

quickymart

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#1222241 26-Jan-2015 09:26

Do providers still sell ISDN? I thought it had been steamrolled by ADSL?

lxsw20

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#1222243 26-Jan-2015 09:32

quickymart: Do providers still sell ISDN? I thought it had been steamrolled by ADSL?

They do for phone services, not sure about internet.

jnimmo

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#1222249 26-Jan-2015 09:38

Definitely, I wonder if it will be slightly more cost effective too now given the rise in price for POTS lines (I don't know if they have increased the price of ISDNs at the same time). No idea how much a PRI costs but that gives you up to 30 channels.

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deadlyllama

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#1222254 26-Jan-2015 09:51

The one question I have is, are these POTS lines all going in to your alarm monitoring appliance at your central location (the assumption everyone here is making), or are they POTS lines at subscriber locations attached to subscriber alarms, which you include the cost of in your monitoring service? Or bith?

Are you stuck with alarm monitoring hardware that only supports POTS lines coming in? If you've got 30 lines that's one E1 (ISDN PRI) worth of lines. ISDN is just as reliable as POTS, and it's a business service with business SLAs, which is what you need. You can buy channelbanks that turn an E1 line into a set of analogue ports to plug your existing alarm monitoring system into.

If your reliability needs are what they sound like they are, you might be better off locating your monitoring appliance in a telco datacentre, and building redundant internet connections back to your office.

Or you can try VoIP but you'd need a well engineered service, not just "ring up random telco and say you need a few voip lines." I understand the alarm monitoring protocols are very sensitive to timing etc and so won't work reliably over a poorly engineered VoIP service.

Our (boring ContactID) alarm at home works just fine over Orcon and now MyRepublic VoIP. I rang up the monitoring company to ask about IP stuff and they said that VoIP over fibre is just fine and that's what the lady who answered the phone uses herself for her own house's alarm monitoring.

(Edit: I see you're local! Welcome to Geekzone. You should come along to the next Geek Meet.)

Wadec

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#1224552 29-Jan-2015 09:34

The POTS lines are going into our alarm monitoring appliance.

The hardware supports IP connections too but the cost of upgrading for customers is going to make the uptake a little slower to IP/GPRS

Thanks for the invite DeadlyLlama, would love to come for the meet!

trig42

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#1224554 29-Jan-2015 09:38

quickymart: You should be able to get after hours service anytime, if you want to pay a premium for such a service.
When I worked there (TCL) it was called "select support". No idea what they call that team now.

It is still called Select, still has the same 0508 phone number. They do a pretty good job too.

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