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.
| March 12 | February 12 | January 12 |
| December 11 | November 11 | October 11 |
| September 11 | August 11 | July 11 |
| June 11 | May 11 | April 11 |
Connections
July 2008
Hello Again,
It was only the other day (at IFSEC to be precise) whilst reminiscing about old times and those people in the monitoring industry who have come and gone, those that are still coming and going and those that should have gone years ago, that it dawned on me that we are celebrating our 25th year of trading.
Back in 1983 when I was a mere 11 stone and had a full head of jet black hair, the 3rd party monitoring industry was in its infancy with only a couple of “central stations” providing services on a regional basis.
The signalling option added to each security quotation was a digital communicator which came with an ongoing monitoring fee (unlike the 999 auto-dialler) and was thought to be a hard sell and probably would never catch on. Trade monitoring fees in those days were between £45-50 with a £10 connection charge and all additional signals were extra, I wonder what that would be if indexed linked to 2008?
SMS grew its customer base along the South Coast and 5 years later the first round of London renumbering was to take place, remote monitoring was still an option on a quote and most small regional installers were not using digital communicators. Despite the slow growth in connections having only achieved 7000 connections in 5 years we went on the very first conversion campaigns encouraging London Installers not to keep adding to their problem and to connect to a central station outside London.
In the late 80’s and very early 90’s, we saw a growth of new central stations appear in the marketplace including Wimpey Regal, BSI Communications, Check and finally an aggressive competitor called Sectron who were owned by Southern Water. All of these centres and many others besides have ceased trading having got out of the marketplace and were acquired in the mid to late 90’s after National Renumbering.
During 1992, 2 years prior to National Renumbering, we built a new ARC in preparation for a large marketing campaign and in 1994 launched with “Operation Changeover” sending out audio tapes and call up papers to enlist in the campaign. At the time we caused quite a stir as we referred to those using premium rate numbers as operating in the black market. Good fun was had by all at SMS and we grew from 13,000 accounts to over 30,000 accounts in 12 months.
In 1999 we upgraded to MAS alarm handling from our old BOLD system which we had seriously outgrown and have powered on over the last 9 years to provide services to over 1200 installers and monitoring in excess of 85,000 connections. In 2004, Northern Monitoring Services was born and has relocated to brand new facilities in 2007
Nowadays the option is both integrated CCTV signalling over IP or dual path monitoring over GPRS and major upgrade campaigns replacing those old digital communicators in an effort to reduce the impact of the BT 21CN network upgrade.
What about in 25 years time? Well, I will be 75 and one of those who should have gone years ago!
Bye for now,
Steve