landline vs cell vs cell-based alarm in home emergency

[rob_s]

Like many other folks, we don't have a landline at home any more. I've been reluctant to rely solely on our two cell phones for emergency purposes so we've kept up a home alarm system that's costing more than I'd like to spend every month. it's got a panic button on it that we haven't had to use but I assume would work in the event we can't find our phones or the kids didn't know what/how to do in an emergency involving all the grownups in the house. I keep thinking of getting some additional panic buttons for various strategic places in the house.

I'm thinking, however of just going back to a landline and keep the ringer turned off. Might even be cheaper as our internet service is through the phone company anyway. We did this briefly when we first moved in but canceled it, but from what I recall the phone was VOIP anyway, not a true "landline" like I was thinking.

I also seem to recall that the phone company used to keep all home lines active for emergencies. I can recall being in houses where I know there was no paid phone service but there was always still a dial tone, but the only number you could call was 911. Am I remembering that right? If so is that still a thing?

What's better in your mind, a monitored alarm system with a panic button that connects via cell or a VOIP "landline"?

[camsdaddy]

When we have had tornados and hurricanes our cell phones were our life lines. The first time our town was hit by a tornado landlines were down a bit but cell phones continued to work. The last hurricane we had we no longer had a landline but cell phones were still working.
Our alarm went to battery back up but was dead within a day or two.

[David C.]

Opposite case for us after a hurricane, the cell phone towers were down and the power was out. The landline worked days before the cell phone and weeks before the electric power. I keep an old line-powered telephone with both touch tone and pulse dialing for use after storms. TBH though, I don't know if the telephone exchanges still have the analog gear to run the pulse dialing.

[RoyGBiv]

We had a lot of grief with our VoIP "landline". Maybe there's been a fix/device for this recently but here's the rub....

VoIP device will output a "phone" signal that you would normally connect directly to a telephone base unit, not directly to your house telephone wiring. Then, the problem becomes how to get that signal from the base unit to your alarm system, which probably sits near a house phone wire that is inactive now that you're on VoIP. If you can interface your VoIP signal to your house telephone wiring successfully, then, this becomes a viable option... for me... it sucked.

We tried switching our alarm to IP communication, but that was still a problem because we don't have RJ-45 (or CAT-s) nearby the alarm controller, so I was using a WiFi bridge that proved to be too flaky/unreliable.

TL/DR..?
Answer... We switched to cellular monitoring. Cost $80(?) for the hardware that I installed myself in 5 minutes. We pay $3 more per month ($15.95) for the new monitoring company.. It just works.

[rob_s]

Opposite case for us after a hurricane, the cell phone towers were down and the power was out. The landline worked days before the cell phone and weeks before the electric power. I keep an old line-powered telephone with both touch tone and pulse dialing for use after storms. TBH though, I don't know if the telephone exchanges still have the analog gear to run the pulse dialing.

Historically, this has been my experience as well. Phone lines come back before power or anything else, for whatever reason.

But now that it's not a real phone line but a VOIP, I don't know enough about the technology to know if it's the same thing, nor whether or not I can even get a "real" phone line instead. Nor, for that matter, if this is still true.

[luckyman]

Grumble grumble grumble... nobody wants to pay for fault tolerant reliable systems anymore, but everyone wants to bitch when the sleek cheap options fail in bad conditions ...
And GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!

[HCM]

Cell phones can also call 911 even if they don’t have contract service. It’s an FCC requirement.

Obviously you do need to have power and a cell signal (but not service).

[Stephanie B]

Cell phones can also call 911 even if they don’t have service.

If there are no bars showing on the phone, how do you call 911?

During the big blackout of 2003, cell phones were useless after about a dozen hours. They were mostly useless before then, as the networks were overwhelmed.

Good old two-wire phone service soldiered on.

[HCM]

If there are no bars showing on the phone, how do you call 911?

During the big blackout of 2003, cell phones were useless after about a dozen hours. They were mostly useless before then, as the networks were overwhelmed.

Good old two-wire phone service soldiered on.

Semantics - you are talking about signal - I’m talking about service from a phone carrier.

Landline phone service is also subject to outages.

It’s also not 2003 anymore - cell phones are now the priority infrastructure vs land lines. The future is now.

[Gater]

Semantics - you are talking about signal - I’m talking about service from a phone carrier.

Landline phone service is also subject to outages.

It’s also not 2003 anymore - cell phones are now the priority infrastructure vs land lines. The future is now.

Exactly. Our "provider" here is in the process of discontinuing old school land line service, and has advised the FCC of same.

[BehindBlueI's]

Like many other folks, we don't have a landline at home any more. I've been reluctant to rely solely on our two cell phones for emergency purposes so we've kept up a home alarm system....

How does your home alarm system communicate with the mother ship? If you don't have a landline, is it not on a cell transmitter? Or is it via cable?

Residential panic alarms are low priority runs and, at least locally, will not summon an emergency response. It's an immediate dispatch but not a lights-and-sirens run. The reason is that damn near 100% of them are false.

[whomever]

1)Not an expert.

2)My sense is that the relative stability of old fashioned land line vs. cell is going to depend strongly on the locale.

3)We've had an alarm for 30 plus years. We've never triggered the panic button, but it has alarmed twice - one false alarm, one real burglary. Both of those had responses within a few minutes. I talked to the responding officers, and I'd paraphrase their answer as 'Yup, lotsa false alarms. We're not going to leave an ax murder to respond, but we like to respond to them; while there are a lot of false alarms, we also catch a lot of burglars'. I'd think that an activated panic button would get a higher priority response than just a motion detector tripping, but I didn't specifically ask.

FWIW, this was a traditional type alarm that phoned home to a monitoring center that did a call back to the house and only contacted the police if no one answered (or whoever answered didn't know the magic word).

[rob_s]

I have not hit our panic button, but my understanding is that the alarm base station becomes a speakerphone when you do and you’re talking to, at the very least, an actual person at the monitoring company.

My concern re: the cell phones is less about the loss of signal (which is a concern in our faux-rural area) and more about the fact that the cell phone may not be available to someone like the children because I’ve fallen and am laying on it and they can’t get to it, it’s not charged, the kids don’t know where mommy left the phone, etc.

[hufnagel]

We've had storms where power, cable, and POTS went down, but internet (fiber) was still up and running, and cell was spotty because 2 of the local tower's generators wouldn't start (so they claimed.)
I had a truck come through one time and rip the POTS and fiber link off the pole, but leave power and cable up.

When hurricane Sandy came through, parts of my area had no gasoline, parts had no natural gas supply, (these fuels for generators), parts had no electricity, and parts had "shit's on fire, yo."

My "landline" has been on the OOMA VoIP system for almost a decade without any major incidences. It's not, however, generally compatible with phone alarm or even faxing services.

We found out by accident that the battery backup in the fiber ONT (Optical Network Terminator; that big box they hang where the fiber comes in) ONLY supplies power to the unit to run the fake POTS connections, so I now keep the ONT plugged into it's own UPS (a "retired" 19 year old APC SmartUPS 1400, that no longer has working COMs, but still seems to do power fine.)

My point is, when someone decides to blow down whatever house of cards defines your condition, you'll have no idea which way that'll land. Prep for it the best you can, but expect that some unknown to you condition will probably crop up next event, and, as is now the latest phrase in the lexicon, melt your snow.

[whomever]

"I'm thinking, however of just going back to a landline and keep the ringer turned off."

I dunno what kind of alarm you have, but ours calls the phone for various reasons. That might not work if the ringer is off :-). Ditto if 911 calls back or something. I saw where you say the alarm unit has a speaker, so yours might not use the phone, but it might be worth asking if the alarm company ever expects a phone to work, if you've told them the alarm is connected via a POTS line. For example, a few days ago out alarm called the mothership to report it's backup battery was bad, and the mothership called us to let us know. We would have eventually noticed a status light on the alarm, but... YMMV, of course, depending on what type of equipment you have.

"I have not hit our panic button, ..."

Does your alarm provider have the concept of test periods? Especially if I expected kids to be able to work the system in an emergency, I'd declare a test period and have the kids work through pushing the button, talking to the monitoring people, etc.

" when someone decides to blow down whatever house of cards defines your condition, you'll have no idea which way that'll land."

+11. Our experience has been the POTS line worked when nothing else did, but that is extremely time and locale specific. In days of old the regulators forced the phone company to maintain a very fault tolerant POTS network. Some areas are still coasting on that installed base; in others the phone companies have been allowed to remove a lot of the POTS redundancy, and some cell providers are upgrading e.g. the backup power at the cell towers. Andeven in a given area, that is changing over time, without IMHE anyone telling the consumer. I don't think you can know up front what will work, short of a carefully installed ham radio.

Even aside from disasters, our area is served by cable and DSL. Sometimes the DSL works and the cable doesn't; sometimes vice versa. And the DSL and POTS lines have failed independently, even though they are the same friggin piece of wire; somewhere down the line the voice and DSL are split out, and the equipment on either side of that split can fail.

[hufnagel]

Verizon in my mom's area deliberately stopped maintaining the underground lines in her area, to force people off of them and on to their higher cost and profit margin fiber solutions. Ones that curiously were no more reliable than the broken, old stuff. There's a good reason telecoms are considered to be the worst companies out there.

[RoyGBiv]

There's a whole lot of "perfect is the enemy of progress" going on here.. :o

What are the chances that your alarm comms service (whatever choice is made) will go down at the same time as a burglary?

-- If you have a medial or fire emergency, that doesn't happen someplace else... it happens where you are. If your alarm button fails, use your cell. Honestly, if I'm facing a medical emergency, I'm dialing 911. I'm not interested in waiting for the alarm company to phone me back and then have them dispatch 911. Tick-tock.

-- If you have a break in while at home... same reasoning. Dial 911. My local PD has implemented SirenGPS (https://www.sirengps.com/). I can summon them to my GPS location anywhere in their AO, from an app on my phone. IMO, even if a smart thief cuts your lines, you still have access to cell service to call 911 or use the app (assuming you turn off your phone wifi so the handset will use cellular data instead of your cut-line wifi). Again, what's the chance this happens in the middle of a power outage that knocks out all telecom, including cell service.? I suppose there's some upside to an incoming call from the alarm company during a break in...

So.... what you really need to run in hands-off mode is setting off the alarm for a break-in when you are not at home.
Choose a reliable telecom service. POTS, IP, Cellular... bearing in mind that a smart crook might snip your wires. If you choose something that needs power, make sure the critical parts are on a UPS. Keep backup batteries fresh.

For me, moving to cellular with a double battery backup was an easy choice. The alarm unit has an internal battery and instead of plugging the unit into the wall outlet directly, I use a small UPS that should provide enough power for a day or two if power goes out.

If all that fails, that's what I have homeowners insurance for.

YMMV

[farscott]

In recent years, POTS maintenance is not being done, and cellular reliability is better than POTS. With AT&T on strike now, POTS is experiencing even more issues with no estimated date of repair.

[talos]

If there are no bars showing on the phone, how do you call 911?

During the big blackout of 2003, cell phones were useless after about a dozen hours. They were mostly useless before then, as the networks were overwhelmed.

Good old two-wire phone service soldiered on.

Would be worth thinking about in a situation where cell phones are down due to overwhelmed network of a crisis, that 911 is overwhelmed so even if you have a landline to call 911 you might not have anyone show up for quite a while.

[rob_s]

Couple of points of clarification as things seem to be running off in weird directions.

We currently have no landline, each parents has a cell phone, and no kids have cell phones
Our alarm system is cell based, and does not connect to a landline
We are in a faux-rural area where cell covered has sometimes been spotty, and lots are a minimum size of 1.5 acres, making "go to the neighbors" a bit of a challenge because (a) the neighbors aren't as close as yours might be and (b) faux-rural areas you tend to know your neighbors less well, at least in my experience
We get our internet (DSL) from the phone provider but we don't have phone service from them
when we did have phone service from the phone/internet provider, it was a VOIP setup
I'm less concerned with what my wife or I do in an emergency, and more concerned with how the kids would get help if they couldn't use one of our phones
I don't know what POTS is, but I assume it's what I'm calling a "real" phone line?

[farscott]

POTS === Plain Old Telephone Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service

[beenalongtime]

POTS, is an OLD abbreviation for Plain Old Telephone Service. Back from when they were mandated (don't know about currently), to have a 99.9% uptime, for national defense reasons.

Are the kids ever on their own now? How do you get in touch with them? While 1.5 acres isn't much, do you have something like an old mower no blade/golf cart, etc. etc. to run around the property (in case they need to get to somewhere in an emergency)?
There have been stories about Facebook, texting 911, etc. to contact the outside world, but another option I would recommend is an inexpensive, prepaid (flip, candy bar style, etc) phone, to call 911. I like (and use) those style phones, because the batteries last a week between charges. My prepaid service, would cost me $100 a year for 1000 minutes, but I never use all of it. This year it cost me $47 after taxes for a prepaid phone.
What about aftermarket VOIP? (won't help if they axe the internet line)

[talos]

Cell jammers are a few hundred bucks on ali baba. Any way to prevent buglaries using those? Maybe some type of dead mans switch where if the signal stops, it triggers the alarm?

[RoyGBiv]

I'm less concerned with what my wife or I do in an emergency, and more concerned with how the kids would get help if they couldn't use one of our phones
Your kids are old enough to be home alone, but none have a cell phone?

Luddite! ;)

Option 0. Teach kids how to use the panic button on the alarm system. That should prove fun. :rolleyes:
Option 1. Get an old cell phone that still works... keep it plugged in and charging somewhere. Teach kids to dial 911 and hit send. Carrier service is not required. Cost: free
Option 2. If the old phone is a smartphone, set up your favorite calling app on it. Skype, WhatsApp, Google Voice, FreedomPop, ETC (https://www.lifewire.com/free-internet-phone-calls-1356646). As long as the smartphone has wifi connection, it'll make calls just fine. Teach kids. Cost: Small amount on a calling account for direct dialing phone numbers.
Option 3. Set up an old laptop with Skype or some other calling-out ability. Put $5 on the account so calls can be made to outside phone numbers. Set up a short list of contacts for easy dialing. Teach kids how to use. Cost: Small amount on a calling account for direct dialing phone numbers.
Option 4. Pick whatever works best in your area.... POTS, VoIP, other.

[HCM]

Cell jammers are a few hundred bucks on ali baba. Any way to prevent buglaries using those? Maybe some type of dead mans switch where if the signal stops, it triggers the alarm?

Ive never seen or hard of them being used in residential crimes.

This seems to fall under "When you hear hoof beats think horses not zebras."

[BehindBlueI's]

Cell jammers are a few hundred bucks on ali baba. Any way to prevent buglaries using those? Maybe some type of dead mans switch where if the signal stops, it triggers the alarm?

Residential burglars just hit the next house without an alarm. They aren't Oceans 11.

[hufnagel]

Would be worth thinking about in a situation where cell phones are down due to overwhelmed network of a crisis, that 911 is overwhelmed so even if you have a landline to call 911 you might not have anyone show up for quite a while.

You mean like say, 9/11 when a major tower disappeared from the network and from what I was told took a shitload of capacity and routing/management equipment with it?
Cell service was absolutely fucked on the NJ side of the river until I was practically back in Bedminster.

[hufnagel]

Residential burglars just hit the next house without an alarm. They aren't Oceans 11.

Considering we are now at something like 50+ stolen vehicles in my "tiny" affluent NJ town from people being so fucking retarded as to leave the keys in their cars overnight and unlocked? In the winter they leave them running too, so the thieves get a nice WARM ride to steal! Criminals don't have to be smart in my area, they just have to put in some minimal effort.

[rob_s]

Your kids are old enough to be home alone, but none have a cell phone?
no, not home alone, but may be home with just one or the other of us and not able to find our phones


Option 0. Teach kids how to use the panic button on the alarm system. That should prove fun. :rolleyes:
that's what we've done already. They both know that in an emergency they are to get to the alarm and hit the button. I'm not one of these people that's going to fake an emergency to test them, but I do ask them from time to time "what do you do in an emergency if you can't get a phone" and they know to hit the button.

[RoyGBiv]

^^^^ You can call the alarm company, give them your code word, and run a test.
We do that when we change backup batteries, about every 2-3 years.

[rob_s]

bumping this up again because a recent lapse in my payment information put the frontpoint bill in my face and we're paying $40+/- a month and I'm wondering if we just want the "panic button" for the kids if we wouldn't be better off with a different system.

Again just to recap, my only real use case is that the kids don't have any way to contact emergency personnel outside of the cell phones an adult has. Meaning if something happens to the adult and the kid can't find or get to their phone, there's nothing the kid can do other than run to a neighbor, and we're on acre+ lots so we can't really rely on that since we don't really know our neighbors or their habits.

Basically, is there a less expensive but equally reliable "panic button" system that works over cell that I can sign up for?

or, do I just buy a flip phone, add it to our plan, and leave it plugged in somewhere?

[mtnbkr]

or, do I just buy a flip phone, add it to our plan, and leave it plugged in somewhere?

That's what we did until the kids were old enough to have phones of their own.

FWIW, for home use, an old smartphone connected to your wifi and GoogleDuo or WhatsApp will allow for VOIP calls to other Duo or WA users without a monthly plan. I use Duo a lot when I travel overseas because I can get a 20GB+ SIM and do VOIP calls to my family while I'm overseas.

Chris

[farscott]

FCC regulations require that any mobile phone able to connect to a network allow "emergency calls". So an older cell phone with no service plan is ideal for this.