Making VoIP and Alarm Signals Compatible

VoIP has brought quite a revolution in the field of communication. As if overnight, people have wiped away the traditional phone line and opted for this relatively new technology that offers a cheap and feasible alternative of connecting with one’s friend and family through the Internet. It is not only useful for residential purposes, but VoIP service providers have economical and useful plans for business owners too.

VOIP is an abbreviation for Voice Over Internet Protocol. It places a user’s call digitally over IP based networks simply through the internet. People have been switching over to Internet phone in order to save money and time. Where an average phone company would charge a user minute by minute and would have separate charges for international calls, VoIP service has a fixed charge rate, which does not rise by the minute.

Now everywhere, people are literally jumping forward to save some money through VoIP, yet they have not considered a serious drawback that lies within using this service. Once a person gets acquainted with the Internet phone, he realizes that his alarm system is not compatible with it, which then forces him to keep his traditional phone line intact. 911 and 15 services are also not found, as mostly VoIP phone does not have an inbuilt system for emergency responses. The designing of an alarm system makes it send its signals over an analog phone line, whereas VoIP coverts a signal into digital, and then again into analog. During all this conversion, the problem with the alarm system takes place. The signals be received by the alarm company, but with a lot of errors, and in some cases, they may not be any signals at all.

Similarly, a person’s alarm system does come with a back-up power supply in case of a power breakdown. Even if that is not available, traditional phone lines keep on working during a power breakdown due to which the alarm company receives the signals properly. VoIP normally does not have a back-up system in case of power failure, thus no signals would be transmitted.

Now what should a person do in order to avoid this technical deficiency of VoIP? A person should inform his alarm company about the switching of a service, as it would have no way of knowing about it on its own. One should make sure that the system is working properly all the time. This can be done through testing one’s service through a fake alarm signal once in a month.

Cellular or radio monitoring can be used in order to transmit alarm signals. Such services are limited to certain areas and may not be available to everyone. One may use a limited analog phone line to make security strong. This costs around fifteen dollars per month, quite affordable and at hand.

Various companies such as Alarm relay and next alarm claim to provide an alarm system, which is adaptable to VoIP.

The deficiency cannot be neglected. Solutions are offers, yet they are not strong enough. One may expect certain changes and adaptabilities from the alarm companies as well as the service providers in order to shed this problem as soon as possible.