Security Guards, Alarm Companies Object to Australia's National Fiber Network

natecochrane writes "Australia's proposed high-speed National Broadband Network has put the fate of more than a million security alarm systems that alert Australians to fire, home invasion, break-in and medical emergency in limbo pending the building of a simulated test bed next year. A group that represents security guards and those that supply monitored alarms has concerns that ranged from the inconvenient ('angry customers woken by their alarm systems beeping' during a nightly NBN upgrade) to life-threatening in the case of medical alarms, its CEO said. 'Under the fibre-optic system there won't be that redundancy and backup [from the copper phone system]. So if it goes down no one will know,' ASIAL CEO Bryan de Caires said."

Re:Really about kickbacks

[MichaelSmith]

I don't know about Australia, but here most people pay a flat rate for phone service. They don't pay per call. So what incentive would telecoms have to give kickbacks to alarm companies?

Correct me if in fact in Australia customers pay per phone call or per minute.

Charge is per call for local calls. Time charges on non-local calls. Back when I worked on traffic signals we could get hard wired leased lines for $300 AUD a year from Telstra within a single exchange area. Our gear was located to minimise the cost of the leased lines. That was two actual strings of conducting copper, point to point. You don't see that these days.

Re:Really about kickbacks

[guruntus]

Most people here pay a charge per land line call 15c, 20c or 25c depending on their "bundle". Copper Land line calls - the ones in question - in general are not timed. When the alarm dials out on the land line, it costs 20c or so to the owner of the alarm - not the alarm monitoring company. If the alarm dials out once every day at say 2am. That's roughly $6 a month per monitored alarm to the telco. This also assumes it is one call per day - could be more. The alarm monitoring company negotiates a deal with the telco, to use them and only them. The telco takes the $6+ a month from every person with a monitored alarm and feeds back a few cents (or dollars) to the alarm monitoring company. Over a few thousand houses (or 10's of thousands houses) this is a nice little earner for the alarm companies. Under the NBN, this all ends.

Re:Is 3g the answer? - no

[Anonymous Coward]

For mission critical or life threatening services a simple 3g service would provide the necesacery backup, or just dual FO connections pointed at different NTU's on seperate networks.

HIGH AVAILABILITY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!!!

Simple redundant comm paths might get you as far as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation [wikipedia.org] 99% availability or, with some engineer finagling, even 99.9% availability. That means that on average such a system might be non-working anywhere from 8.5 hours to more than 3.5 days in the course of a year.

The copper telephone network systems requires a level of availability that defined the term "carrier grade" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_grade [wikipedia.org], aka 99.999% available. That means they might be non-working for little more than 5 minutes during an entire year.

That's a huge difference.

People misunderstanding redundancy claim

[brunes69]

People on here are misunderstanding the claim of redundancy.

What the guy is talking about is with the POTS, your telco has giant battery and generator warehouses that can run the entire city grid for 48+ hours in the event of power outage. Normally, this is not the case with fibre, especially at all of the junctions.

Re:But on he other hand

[NJRoadfan]

I have Verizon FiOS here in the US. Verizon claims the battery backup is good for up to 8 hours. The ONT goes into a low power mode when on battery where only POTS is available for use. If you need TV/internet access or longer POTS backup, you can connect the ONT to a plain old UPS without any problems.

PING

[dsstao]

There are so many examples of single-point-of-failure scenarios that we already have a solution for it - heartbeat monitoring (PINGs). The alarm/security company sends out heartbeat checks every 2-5 seconds, the device at the customer's home responds. If it doesn't, an alert pops up. It's clean, simple, and is done probably millions of times a day already. Is this article serious that people are legitimately worried that no one will know when a line goes down? And, for someone else who mentioned it - have a cellular backup... if the pings fail, try to get to it through a secondary (cellular) network. If that doesn't work, an alert pops up and a call goes to the homeowner asking if their house hasn't exploded, taking the security equipment with it or something.

lol

[Charliemopps]

I work for a large telco and coincidentally monitor alarms all day long. Our sites that are on copper go down constantly. Every lightening storm knocks out hundreds of customers. We always joke when a site switches to fiber that we'll not be talking to them anymore. Sometimes we call the local techs to say goodbye. Why? Because once a site switches to fiber they NEVER go down again. It's like they vanish off of our alarm maps. The simple fact of the matter is that the only situations that can drop the fiber connection would most definitely drop any copper connection in the area as well... major router going down, cable cut, etc... This redundancy crap they are talking about just shows how little they know about how it works. The REAL reason they object to this is obvious, I've seen first hand how their "alarms" work. The more sophisticated alarms actually have some 1990's era modem inside that dials into the alarm company to tell them theirs trouble. This requires a standard pots line. I've seen these lines go down for weeks before the alarm company runs a standard test and realizes it doesn't work anymore and calls us. Then I find out their customer didn't know what the line was for so they requested a disconnect 3 weeks ago. Great reliability from your security company there... Then there is the OLD SCHOOL way of doing things. The alarm company just uses our copper pair as an Open/Closed circuit. A simple smoke alarm that opens the circuit when it goes off, or, and this was my favorite, the water alarm. The cable pair would end with 2 contacts that were held apart by an aspirin. (no I'm not kidding) if there was flooring and the water got too high, the aspirin would dissolve, the contacts would touch and the circuit would complete and set off the remote alarm. Once ever 3 months they would call me to test and replace the aspirin. If everything switches to fiber, their $2 alarm systems would have to switch to something that could work on fiber that'd cost $100+. That's what they're concerned about.