Using OBI110 with alarm system ?
MichiganTelephone:
Quote from: SteveInWA on April 02, 2011, 10:50:53 pm
Editorial: I just cannot imagine my personal/family safety depending on Google's voice service for alarm monitoring. There are too many analog-to-digital-to-analog-to-digital conversions between your alarm panel and the alarm company when using even the best VoIP. My advice: get a quality VoIP service or a traditional telco line for your alarm, or use a cellular or IP-based solution from your alarm company.
And for the rest of us, who aren't of the "let's put safety above our enjoyment of life" mentality (wouldn't you have hated to be a kid living with that kind of parent? I was, and believe me, it's no fun at all!), I will just note again that although I have no personal experience with the company, I've seen several VoIP users express satisfaction with the services of NextAlarm. As I mentioned in the other thread, there is no guarantee that a traditional landline is reliable anymore, particularly in areas where the phone company has been sold or merged with another company in the past decade.
SteveInWA:
No need for going "postal" (pun intended) with a personal attack over my mention of POTS lines. I never said that a POTS line was the only option, nor the most reliable. I was also not advocating or taking a position on the value of alarm systems. If you don't need one, fine. The OP has one, and was asking about connectivity.
I was merely pointing out that, if one's goal is relatively reliable monitoring of a security system, then select a connectivity method that is likely to be RELATIVELY more reliable, compared to all choices. Your mileage may vary, depending on your locale and service providers. I just do not believe Google Chat/Google Voice being as reliable as one of the more established VoIP providers, or a cellular or broadband, or a POTS connection.
Since you and I both mentioned Nextalarm, go dig through their site, where they explain why conventional VoIP service is a poor choice. The issue is that the alarm panel generates analog tones (originally designed for POTS line specs), which the VoIP adapter digitizes, and sends over the (usually) public internet. Then, at the far-end telco CO, the digitized data is converted back into analog tones, and ends up at the monitoring center, with varying degrees of accuracy, depending on codec used, connection quality, etc. This is the same reason fax transmissions over VoIP are troublesome at times. Nextalarm's solution, ironically, is VoIP-based, but instead of going through transitions to the PSTN central office and back again, they use a custom-configured, dedicated Cisco/Linksys ATA which connects directly to their own digital back-end, like an extension on a IP PBX. That way, not only do you get better end-to-end signal quality, but they can also monitor the connection to the ATA and detect outages.
Now, certainly, someone is going to chime in and say that their VoIP service works fine with their alarm provider, and that's great for them. I'm just saying: decide which balance of cost and reliability is important to you.
MichiganTelephone:
SteveInWA, I'm sorry if you felt that was a "personal attack" and felt the need to be so defensive. I'm merely pointing out that when one is in a VoIP-oriented forum, it's probably not the best idea to suggest landlines as a solution. However, if someone already has a landline and intends to keep it, then of course it would be better to use that for the alarm service than Google Voice. The problem with both your posts (one of which was in another thread) is that, in my opinion anyway, they sort of cross the line into lecturing people as to how much they ought to value "safety" (and, by implication, what they should be willing to spend to obtain it), whereas everyone has different priorities. But, it's not like you were really abrasive about it — you just made an "editorial" comment and I responded with one of my own. I appreciate the information in your posts, just please try to remember that we're not all incapable of making our own decisions. And having said that, I again apologize if you felt my response was a personal attack, because it certainly was not intended as such.
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