Central station redundancy and its significance is essential to understand. A select group have maintained redundancy over the years, although UL hasn’t mandated redundancy until recently.
Traditional security and the smart home are the same. There — I’ve said it. Our industry likes to see them as different, but for someone growing up now, without any preconceptions of alarm systems, they all just look like a lot of gadgets for the home. So what does this mean for the smart home and traditional alarm monitoring?
When I first entered the security industry in 1973, alarm communications were performed by Direct Wire, McCulloh and some high security applications using voice-grade telephone lines configured in “open window” and later “closed window” bridges.
The COVID-19 pandemic presents numerous unprecedented challenges to the monitoring industry and those with a stake in the protection services it provides. Not the least of these is operating in a regulated environment, under standards that did not fully anticipate the impact of public health mitigations.
At last, 2021 is here — I can’t be the only one happy to leave 2020 in the dust! The year brought so many changes to the business of monitoring, our heads haven’t stopped spinning. With the COVID-19 pandemic, and the unemployment numbers that unfortunately came along with it, providing peace of mind has never been more important.
Communication — both with end users and emergency personnel — has always been an essential part of any monitoring business. The methods through which monitoring centers communicate, though, have become incredibly varied.
The pandemic has brought changes for wholesale central stations. UL has temporarily allowed central station operators to work from home, provided certain requirements were met; and multiple wholesale central stations chose that option — others went a different route.
Calipsa, a provider of deep-learning powered video analytics for false alarm reduction, will host the free, two-and-a-half-hour virtual event beginning at 10 a.m. on Nov. 18.
