Sir - there is a certain amount of redcare desperation in Steven Alton's Letter To The Editor regarding the use of IP for alarm transmission systems (‘There is much cause for alarm with IP', SMT, December 2005, pp16-19) and in his Opinion article (‘Alarms-over-IP: an alternative vision for users', SMT, December 2005, pp13-14).

The industry is already growing more confident with using IP-based technologies. A confidence mirrored by the fact that, come 2009, more than 90% of all UK telephone and data traffic will be using the new BT 21st Century Network Broadband IP network. That would appear to make the use of IP a pretty safe bet.

BT redcare - and all the other third party network solutions like it - use a host polling machine installed well away from the Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC), whereas IP products can be located where they should be... within the ARC.

The redcare approach monitors only the last mile of the network, from the premises to the exchange, and ignores the network into the ARC, delivering both the primary and secondary dual path solution over the same link. Our polling engines continually exchange messages between the ARC and the alarm system, and these are properly encrypted (using AES 128-bit encryption) to the highest commercial grade.

Each message is sequenced such that it is impossible to make a substitution of hardware or software. Substitution protection using AES encryption and sequencing is the most important feature of the new EN Standard, and indeed is the only defence against the more serious breed of criminals.

Private and public Broadband networks are extremely reliable and globally available. Our customers have experienced availability figures that are very much better than those required within the EN specification for Grade 4 systems exceeding 99.99%. If you add GPRS for dual path signalling then you cannot hope to create a more stable solution. GPRS networks provided by all of the UK's major concerns are very reliable. Our experiences suggest availability well in excess of 99.99%.

Should the reliability of Broadband networks be as poor as Steven Alton suggests, market forces will prevent the IP solution from being a success. That said, our experience is to the contrary, and our customers like the additional benefits provided. They can now send their alarms with additional serial information to identify where and when the alarm occurred.

The end user benefits of such systems include savings in annual costs for both lines and third party monitoring. Using 21st Century hardware technology, we are able to integrate all of the functionality required for the alarm system and add CCTV in addition to audio verification.

Paul Carter, Managing Director, WebWayOne

Source

SMT