Monitoring News
Every month our Managing Director, Steve Kimber, fills us in on the latest monitoring news.
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Below is an archive of the previous year's monthly columns or click here for earlier news columns.
| September 10 | August 10 | July 10 |
| June 10 | May 10 | April 10 |
| March 10 | February 10 | January 10 |
| December 09 | November 09 | October 09 |
| September 09 |
Connections
February 2010
Hello Again,
Well, winters hit with a vengeance and boy were we pleased to have two ARC’s!
Despite the inclement weather and the difficulty travelling to and from work, our Manchester and Portsmouth ARC’s managed to increase normal manning levels to cope with the increased levels of alarm activity and key holder response due to the lack of police response. Most of the increase in alarms was, as predicted, associated with mains failures and low battery, mixed with a fair sprinkling of fail to test signals and communication failures due to the lack of telecoms at the customers’ premises.
During this difficult period we also handled many alarm companies phone lines 24/7 as they could not get to their offices, this of course put extra pressure on the ARC’s but despite this and because of the additional resources we achieved across the network, we maintained all of our normal high performance statistics and on some days surpassed them!
We have noted with interest that recently this has not been the case with some of our competitors, especially those with only one active ARC. It has been reported to us that service levels in some instances have dropped quite significantly and that even an ARC’s telecommunications were affected, severely impacting services.
A dual centre ARC is the final link for the technology that is installed in a customers’ premises, what is the point of having dual signalling into a single point of failure? Granted ARC’s have to have contingency plans to switch their activities to another centre, but this inevitably will involve a significant period of outage as the plans are implemented.
Southern & Northern Monitoring Services are certificated by NSI for High Integrity Monitoring, (the equivalent of the old BS7042 high security requirement) and this means there is no interruption to service. Why pay a monitoring fee for the use of one ARC, when you can two for the price of one?
Keep warm and to help to keep those heating bills down, have a look at http://www.passivsystems.com/press.aspx, if you interested in joining our installer channel give me a call.
Bye for now,
Steve