Ip Alarm Signalling

[jb-eye]

Steve

This is just my opinion and Jimcarter would have a differing take but then we both have diffrent perspective of how the IP alarm alarm monitoring market should be implemented. End of there has to be a profit.

IP alarm market may sound simple enough as a carrier for alarm trafic but then we open a minefield of intrested parties and installation standards without touching on the different protocols and matching to various control equipment manufacturers.

Cost? now thats an intresting Q. PSTN monitoring is so competative that ARC (monitoring Stations) had to rely on call revenue share to make it pay. Now we have IP someone has to make a pottentialy free carrier viable.

Security and not the infrastructure of the WWW or any other but IF you ever visited a subscribers property tyou would see the danger of trusting IP monitoring to a large percentage as UNSAFE.

Traditional alarm coms suppliers often ofset hardware costs off against revenue BUT these mediams are guaranteed established large industry sales so its a no brainer unfortunately IP isnt suitable for the mass market as see above so it has to be invested in. i can sell you IP monitoring for a morgage up front for instal and thupence a week monitoring or vice versa. To be fair i have such an array of kit available i can pretty much do IP subject to suitablilaty for about £600-700 a year an i carry the equipment cost should you commit to a minimum term of 3 years. Does that help?

Not going to edit, rather appolagise for the grammer

Jef

[Steve Howard]

i can pretty much do IP subject to suitablilaty for about £600-700 a year an i carry the equipment cost should you commit to a minimum term of 3 years. Does that help?

Wow - strikes me as insanely expensive. The hardware cost of the 'widget' on site cant be more than £20 max (as an additional to an existing system, installed at the same time etc), and as you say the carrier is free. Obviously there is maintenance, but I assume this is seen in the context of an alarm system as a whole. I have no idea how much an ARC expect to make per customer per year, but again, if the system is well maintained and not continually going off, the workload can't be that much.

As an example we have IP based sensor systems that measure electricity useage and report back using IP - power usage too low assume equipment fail, too high assume fault etc. We give the hardware away free and then charge £20 or so a month, including data handling (multiple real time samples per second, time-outs for no data received etc) and alerts. Maybe we just don't charge enough?

I think maybe I have to alter our expectations - or just design a dual signalling IP product of my own )

(And yes I take the point about approvals, mostly from self interested industry bodies, but even IPS277 appears to be just a protocol over IP, if I have googled correctly).

[james.wilson]

LPS1277 is far more than just a protocol document.

But as above rates depend on service level and grading, Your system i guess is an automatic system, ie no 24 hour human operators actioning real alarm events and things like ac failures, late to set, early to open etc. But if just doing basic low end non managed paths then yes you could do it for £20 a month or so. But as with everything it depends on the needs. You also need all the redunancy in the managed system and the development costs etc.

While in a perfect world a single transmission only needs to be sent and assuming all is ok even a pstn line can achieve that with a simple call. Unfortunatly security stuff tends to be attacked and probed for weaknesses. Im guessing this isnt the case in other industries

[Steve Howard]

Point taken James, but isn't the point that the £700 or so mentioned above is a huge premium over the same service from the same ARC using (say) straight telephone / digi alerting. I thought a 'normal' ARC response service for an intruder alarm was more around the £100-200 mark, not £700. My (incorrect?) assumption was that this was an unwarranted and unjustified markup just because 'new' technology was being used?

[jb-eye]

My (incorrect?) assumption was that this was an unwarranted and unjustified markup just because 'new' technology was being used?

Your not far off the mark. There is a lot of anti IP signalling from various areas of the security industry. Then again many installation firms arnt up to the job unles they get plug and play. R&D from my own preferred control equipment supplier have no intrest due to lack of intrest if you understand. Lack of intrest comes because installers can't make a profit so we sit on old lesser technologies.

[james.wilson]

Yes id say it would be around that mark to the end user. I suppose it goes on how much you break down the whole package and signalling performance criteria from digi to dual path ats6

[jb-eye]

Yes id say it would be around that mark to the end user. I suppose it goes on how much you break down the whole package and signalling performance criteria from digi to dual path ats6

£200 for a digi would be from the tier of installation co that would kack its pants understanding an IP signalling system .

You get what you pay for.

[Steve Howard]

£200 for a digi would be from the tier of installation co that would kack its pants understanding an IP signalling system .

You get what you pay for.

So what would be a reasonable end user price for what you would call a reasonable monitored system connected to an existing (assumed modern, still workable) alarm - both in terms of install (presumably hardware) and ongoing (presumably maintenance + ARC cost)?

Are these seemingly high costs a key income source for this sector of the industry, faced with pricing pressures in the hardware supply/ install of the alarms themselves, or is that wide of the mark?

[james.wilson]

So what would be a reasonable end user price for what you would call a reasonable monitored system connected to an existing (assumed modern, still workable) alarm - both in terms of install (presumably hardware) and ongoing (presumably maintenance + ARC cost)?

What grade, what performance criteria under attack? There are many many systems that range from £100 to >£1000

[Steve Howard]

You will have to pardon my ignorance here - surely the 'resistance under attack' is a function of the hardware (ie voice dialler through to dual/ triple path) but the ARC end (the 'call me or police when it goes off') is pretty constant? Ultimately I guess I'm trying to understand where a IP + GPRS solution would fit into this scale, if that's not a rather oversimplified task? [and thanks in advance for your patience and time answering!]