Monitoring News
Every month our Managing Director, Steve Kimber, fills us in on the latest monitoring news.
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| December 09 | November 09 | October 09 |
| September 09 |
Connections
October 2008
Hello Again,
The question of what does an ARC/RVRC actually do and why don’t they all work the same way, seems to be on the agenda for both insurers and alarm installers as they try to determine the black art of running a monitoring centre.
Well, it’s not really a black art as there are many Standards covering construction and the operation of ARC/RVRC’s, with different scopes covering intruder alarms, fire alarms, CCTV monitoring, GPS tracking and high security (continuity of service).
These Standards determine that we have to meet basic criteria in the construction of the centre and the way we operate the business, the keyword being “basic”. Yes, there are basic processes in monitoring centres on how alarms are filtered, how efficiently they are filtered is determined by the investment the centre has made in its software, training and infrastructure to handle the volumes of activity.
So there are differences between the service levels the ARC/RVRC offers depending on whether they meet the basic requirements of the Standards or whether they develop further to differentiate themselves from the competition. The basics are a given, those that have, sell on their additional investment of infrastructure and continuity of service.
The basic requirement to handle alarms using a computerised software solution is to have one computer system and a means to handle alarms manually in the event of the computer not working. At the other end of the scale, such as ourselves, there are 4 active computer systems running concurrently, through duplicated centres, over duplicated receiving equipment, telephone lines, gateways and duplicated interconnecting networks between the centres.
If a customer invests in a sequentially confirmed alarm, signalling over a dual path signalling device which delivers the alarm signal over a duplicated resilient signalling network to the ARC, they expect service. The ARC could be an NSI Gold centre meeting BS5979 for a single centre location; capable of running manually with some form of contingency plan to reinstate services (eventually) in the event of the centre being inoperative, this is the weakest link unless you have a “live” second centre.
Network infrastructure and resilience between multi ARC locations are equally as important as the basic BS5979 Standard. In my view a single centre ARC with a contingency plan is balancing the commercial risk against their business costs and potentially putting their customers at risk. What is the point of a sequentially confirmed, dual path signalling system, or a BS8418 CCTV system signalling into a potential single point of failure?
Bye for now,
Steve