My Home’s Phone – Plan B

The best-laid plans of nerds are as subject to upset as those of mice or other men. Turns out our summer place is gonna have a Verizon line after all in order to have reliable alarm service; I hate it but today went online at Verizon.com and ordered.

Last blogged about my plan to use a dedicated Vonage “line” for this purpose; actually installed the Vonage ATA and asked the alarm people to hook it up to the alarm controller. They told me that the monitoring service advised against using a VoIP line for this purpose because of “delay in Vonage servers which could cause the signaling to fail”. Also pointed out, correctly, that the system wouldn’t be able to call for help when either power or IP connectivity are down.

Because the phone network was built at roughly the same time as the electric grid and sometimes proceeded it, traditional telephone service gets electric power through the copper phoneco lines and not through the electric grid. This accident of history has been particularly useful when calling the power company to tell them that power is out - and calling for help in other powerless emergencies. Not as important now as it used to be since we have mobile phones with their own batteries and can recharge from the batteries and generators in our cars. In fact new telco technologies like fiber do NOT deliver power; that’s something metal conductors are particularly suited for.

The summer place has both a UPS for short-term flickers in power and a standby generator for longer outages so loss of grid power not a concern here. Although our wireless ISP has been known to have outages (infrequent but more than the phone network), I was willing to take a chance on an IP interruption – especially since I have a plan (to be blogged later) for backup IP.

I assumed the stuff about “delay” was just anti-VoIP prejudice but it was enough to send me to the Vonage site for more information..  Searched on “alarm system”; found this:

“Vonage may not be compatible with some home alarm systems that are set up to automatically contact central monitoring stations. Vonage does not guarantee that Vonage will work as the connection between alarm systems and monitoring stations. Vonage contractors will not connect Vonage to any alarm systems and Vonage will not provide technical support to this type of connection.”

Even though the Vonage forum does contain examples of alarming working over Vonage and elaborate instructions for wiring between the Vonage device and your alarm system, I made my decision quickly after imagining explaining to an insurance company that we actually had the alarm system we represented ourselves as having but it was connected through a service which says it may be incompatible and against the recommendation of the monitoring company.

I also wasn’t reassured by the link on the Vonage site to the promotion they are doing with alarm.com for radio-based alerting even though that has some virtues in its own right. Certainly doesn’t give you the feeling that Vonage believes in VoIP for alarm systems.

So I signed up for Verizon which also doesn’t guarantee that calls will go through but wouldn’t be a reason for an insurance company paying a claim. Sigh.

Nerd discussion: reader Rob posted a comment in which he guesses correctly that the problem which Vonage has with some alarm systems is similar to the problem which it has supporting some fax machines. Both fax and the modem signaling which alarm systems use were kludges developed to get data over the voice network which was all that we had at the time.  Both of them rely on the fact that the voice network is synchronous which the Internet is not.  Carrying voice on the non-synchronous Internet requires the clever applications which VoIP relies on; kludges have also been developed for carrying applications which are really data masquerading as voice but these are kludges of kludges and are not completely reliable – especially since different manufacturers have implemented fax and modem differently.

There are market opportunities here both for VoIP companies and alarm companies who are willing to work to use IP to transfer alarm data without the unreliable technique of having data pretend to be voice in order to be carried over a data network pretending to be a voice network. Homes WILL need and have and depend on reliable IP connections. But we’re not there yet.