landline vs cell vs cell-based alarm in home emergency

[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..

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. 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.

1. We currently have no landline, each parents has a cell phone, and no kids have cell phones
2. Our alarm system is cell based, and does not connect to a landline
3. 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
4. We get our internet (DSL) from the phone provider but we don't have phone service from them
5. when we did have phone service from the phone/internet provider, it was a VOIP setup
6. 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
7. I don't know what POTS is, but I assume it's what I'm calling a "real" phone line?