Elk M1Gold IP monitoring

Hello all. I recently had a lightning strike that took out a lot of hardware, including my next alarm ABN.
 
So now that I am forced to replace it, it brings up the question.  Does anybody know if there are any good options for IP monitoring?  When I talked to next alarm this morning, they told me that they don't offer it, and never had.  But I seem to remember reading that some members of this forum did set it up, with mixed results.
 
If I can't use Next Alarm, are there any other options?
 
FYI, I am using VOIP (Vonage), so direct POTS dial-up doesn't seem like a viable option.

I've setup multiple people with Alarm Relay Internet monitoring without issue (with Elk systems). You just have to understand the obvious vulnerability of not being monitored if your Internet it out. Because of this most people go with cellular based solutions.

Drvnbysound, thanks for the response, and the tip on Alarm Relay.
 
Unfortunately, I live in an area with very poor cellular coverage, and to make matters worse, I'm close to the bottom of a hill on the 'dark side' of the closest tower.  But the good news -- my broadband is extremely reliable.

Tunaman said:

But the good news -- my broadband is extremely reliable.

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You may think you have a reliable broadband connection, but there is a lot more to it than that.  Your connection to your ISP is only the first hop in getting to your monitoring service.
 
Often, there are a dozen or more hops that a data packet takes from its source to the destination.  I just did a trace route to AlarmRelay, and see 21 hops.  Any one of the connections from one hop to the next can be down at any time.  Maybe for milliseconds, maybe minutes, or even hours.  So even if I can make a connection right now, there is no guarantee that it will work a minute from now.
 
IP protocol, by definition, is not a reliable transport. It's perfectly all right if data packets get lost and are never delivered, and no notification is provided back to the sender.  Many ethernet switches will just throw packets away when they are subject to heavy traffic loads and have trouble handling all the traffic.
 
Making a connection reliable is the responsibility of higher levels of software.  Most alarm panels don't contain any software or firmware for reliable communication over IP.
 
This is why IP monitoring is the least reliable vs POTS or cellular.

Tunaman said:

Hello all. I recently had a lightning strike that took out a lot of hardware, including my next alarm ABN.
 
So now that I am forced to replace it, it brings up the question.  Does anybody know if there are any good options for IP monitoring?  When I talked to next alarm this morning, they told me that they don't offer it, and never had.  But I seem to remember reading that some members of this forum did set it up, with mixed results.
 
If I can't use Next Alarm, are there any other options?
 
FYI, I am using VOIP (Vonage), so direct POTS dial-up doesn't seem like a viable option.

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That's amusing.
 
That's how NA has been monitoring systems for years....albeit via an ABN and proprietary methods. Of course, NA really isn't the true be-all end all and the end monitoring entity, but that's another discussion.
 
IP monitoring isn't completely reliable, however it's gotten better over the years. It's true that the data can hop and the path isn't completely reliable 100% of the time, but it has improved. The key is knowing how the CS maintains and supervises the heartbeat in addition to what their SOP for drops.

DELInstallations said:

IP monitoring isn't completely reliable, however it's gotten better over the years. It's true that the data can hop and the path isn't completely reliable 100% of the time, but it has improved. The key is knowing how the CS maintains and supervises the heartbeat in addition to what their SOP for drops.

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Really is any method 100% reliable?  If you see what happens after a natural disaster often cell towers go out as well.  Then lets say the police get your alarm, will they 100% respond?  If your alarm went off during hurricane Katrina or Sandy and the police actually received it, what do you think the odds are the police or fire department would be at your house in 10 minutes?  If you said 0.0000% you would be correct. 
 
 

 

ano said:

Really is any method 100% reliable?  If you see what happens after a natural disaster often cell towers go out as well.  Then lets say the police get your alarm, will they 100% respond?  If your alarm went off during hurricane Katrina or Sandy and the police actually received it, what do you think the odds are the police or fire department would be at your house in 10 minutes?  If you said 0.0000% you would be correct.

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No method is 100% reliable, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't consider the overall reliability of the method you choose.
 
It all depends on where you live, of course.  The probability of a hurricane making landfall in a given year varies from a few percent in the northeast up to 50% for Florida.  And the scenario you are proposing represents a compound probability of 3 events (natural disaster, communications loss, and security event) happening at the same time, further reducing the odds you will experience such an event.
 
That said, my internet service goes out on a daily basis (usually for just a few minutes here and there during a day), but my POTS line has been out just once in over 30 years.  And never during a major storm, despite whole trees coming down on the telco cables.  The cable TV lines break if just a moderately large branch lands on them.
 
To me, that's a very real and very large difference in reliability.

RAL said:

That said, my internet service goes out on a daily basis (usually for just a few minutes here and there during a day), but my POTS line has been out just once in over 30 years.  And never during a major storm, despite whole trees coming down on the telco cables.  The cable TV lines break if just a moderately large branch lands on them.

 
To me, that's a very real and very large difference in reliability.

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You know your conditions better than everyone, so certainly you have to do what makes sense for your area.  In my area analog phone service isn't even offered any longer, so that's not a choice.  I track the internet uptime and it has gone out occasionally usually in the middle of the night.  As more people use Internet for everything from video to hone control to monitoring, service providers will be forced to make uptime greater, just like they have for POTS.

ano said:

Really is any method 100% reliable?  If you see what happens after a natural disaster often cell towers go out as well.  Then lets say the police get your alarm, will they 100% respond?  If your alarm went off during hurricane Katrina or Sandy and the police actually received it, what do you think the odds are the police or fire department would be at your house in 10 minutes?  If you said 0.0000% you would be correct. 

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RAL nailed it on the head and statistically, IP is LESS reliable than POTS (a utility) and cellular (another utility) which have far different standards and legal requirements. Sandy was a bunch of items that were lumped into a historical event.The NE is less likely to experience hurricane and storm damage along what Sandy delivered vs. FL or the coastal areas....but we also have snow and ice loading.
 
Sandy had a lot of other issues up here, the main being loss of commercial power for an extended period of time, combined with the destruction or damage to the trunking and infrastructure (there were many investigations after the fact with regulatory going after the utilities and their maintenance of lines, right of ways and proper pruning to protect infrastructure). The facts were about 60% of towers were down, but that was due to disruptions elsewhere, not the sheer impact of Sandy itself.
 
As far as response time, your facts don't align with the true numbers and the honest truth (being a dealer with accounts affected by the damage and traffic) is the CS were triaging the signals internally to also avoid overwhelming the emergency system, but in the case of actual events that required dispatch with systems "online", that experienced events, the appropriate dispatches were performed in a timely manner and responded to by the authorities in a reasonable time. Actually, there were a lot of "saves" and life safety events that were reported and responded to prior to catastrophic losses occurred.
 
The big difference is what is viewed and regulated as a utility vs. what is viewed and not regulated as an "information service".  There's a reason why NFPA provides clear cut guidelines when monitoring commercial fire through a service other than POTS which are far more regulated.

Two is one, one is none.

The reality is that it's ALL x-over-IP as this point, as soon as any provider (POTS, Cellular, RF, Etc) can convert to IP they do. And IP is pretty reliable at this point, It's that last mile that gets you.

...v

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

viroid said:

Two is one, one is none. The reality is that it's ALL x-over-IP as this point, as soon as any provider (POTS, Cellular, RF, Etc) can convert to IP they do. And IP is pretty reliable at this point, It's that last mile that gets you. ...v Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

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There is a slight difference however.....in a POTS system, even though the telco can switch to IP, they are required to maintain a level of service as a utility (governed entity). End to end TCP/IP, unless a higher class service, is viewed as a technology and no requirements are maintained.