CCTV, Alarms and other Physical Security Need to cut through the BS on Alarm monitoring costs

I am looking for honest, unbiased, unemotional answers to this
question. (I know it's Usenet, but one can always hope...)

I currently have a fire & burglary monitoring policy with the local
dominant alarm company. I own the equipment and I am responsible for
service charges to fix the equipment.

They charge me $36/month for straight Internet monitoring.

National online monitoring companies offer seemingly the same service
for $8.95/month. Or 1/4 the cost.

My high-priced local company claims:
- They are big (20,000 customers) - but the national competitor claims
  40,000 customers

- Their service center is "local" -- but it's really halfway across the
  state so does that really mean anything in the day of the Internet

- They are a "security company" vs. competitors being "monitoring"
  companies. Though not sure what that means or why I care

- They have a 5-star UL-listed center - but the national competitor
  claims to be UL-listed and it's not clear what 5-stars means and who
  even grants such certification. Sounds like marketing hype.

- They have 30-second average response time -- but competitor claims the
  same

- They say they have a better BBB track record than big national
  competitors - but the competitor claims an A+ BBB rating which can't
  be too bad

The bottom line is that I can't see one compelling reason to pay 4 times
the competitor rate for what seems to be a commodity service.

- I live in a very safe, low crime neighborhood.

- I primarily pay for the monitoring to get the insurance break.

- I don't stay up nights worrying about fires or burglaries and in any
  case I still have the in-house alarm to warn me of a fire and scare
  off amateur burgalers.

- I am technically adept and have no problem servicing and programming
  my system

Seems like worst case perhaps the response time will be a few seconds
longer in some rare cases or maybe there is a small chance they will
make a mistake -- but the point is that there are so many other failure
points in a security system and we are talking about rare events (fire,
burglary) anyway.

So, why pay 4 times as much????

Go to that national service and find out the hard way. What they
promise and what they deliver is another story.
I have seen national centers take 20 minutes to dispatch a fire
system . owe did I mention the phone calls in middle of night because
your system did not test or some other thing that could wait till
morning  go ahead go to that other service you will gladly pay 10
times the cost to go back to what you have.

I asked to avoid the emotional marketing hype and hyperbole.
- I highly doubt 20 minutes to dispatch a fire system is the rule or
  even the exception
- I hightly doubt test calls in the middle of the night are a regular
  feature (they staff less overnight and probably have to pay more).
- I highly doubt it would be worth paying 4 times the amount let alone
  10 times for a protection that I barely use (the burgularly part since
  we often don't even arm the system) or the rare case of a fire where
  we are away or don't hear the alarm and need someone else to call for
  us

I would almost guarantee you work for one of those companies trying to
scam users with high fees.

Your response was a waste of bandwidth and exactly what I wanted to
avoid.

I would be happy to entertain fact-based and documented differences in
service levels. But ridiculous generic scare stories without facts or
logical basis are less than worthless...

On 01/02/2012 5:45 PM, blueman wrote:

- Twenty minutes to dispatch the fire trucks is criminal.

- Systems I program are designed to transmit test signals between
midnight and 0300.  Less traffic and less likely to interfere with more
important signals (like openings and closings).  Fail to test reports
are generated sometime later.  I usually get mine around 0700.

- You're right.  $36.00 a month is a very steep rate for a home security
system that typically won't require "special actions" like a phone call
to let you know you forgot to arm your system.  Find someone with a
monitoring station that's "local" to you.  Not only will the price be
more reasonable, the service will likely be much better too.

Nick doesn't work for one of "those companies" and many here will tell
you to steer clear of them.

I also don't think you'll get much for your $8.95 (either in service or
peace of mind).  The same goes for so called "free systems".

BBB should only be used as a "rough guide" and as a small part of the
investigative process one undertakes to find a qualified, reputable
alarm company.  Talk to your neighbours and friends.  Talk to your local
police service.  And always remember:  "Google is your friend".

I don't care how "techno savvy" you might be, you'd never get access to
installer level programming on a system I would monitor.  It's not about
"you", it's about what you could inadvertently screw up.

--
Frank Kurz
www.firetechs.net

Yeah, my overpriced current company has a whole page of "scare" stories
of how people's houses burned down with ADT. I'm sure with the millions
of alarms out there times decades of history that anyone can cherry pick
a few colossal failures.

But we live in the world of statistics and risk-adjusted probabilities
not anecdoetes. The question is what is the additional risk to life and
property for going with a far cheaper service vs. the overpriced
regional monopoly. We makes such decisions all the time when we choose
what cars to drive, whether to cross a street, whether to play a contact
sport, etc. My guess is that we are talking millions of dollars of
excess premiums per potential life saved and thousands of dollars in
excess premiums per dollar of property damage averted. I can spend the
saved dollars in much better ways with significantly higher returns on
either safety or personal amusement.

Also, it's hard to believe that a UL-listed service would maintain its
certification if such extreme cases were anything but the rarest of
outliers. Plus, anything that extreme would probably be grossly
negligent opening them up to legal liability (but I will remember to
check to make sure that any company I choose is insured in case of the 1
in a billion case that my house burns down when we and our neighbors are
not around to hear the blood-curdling alarm and when the monitoring
station happens to choose that unlucky moment to take 20 minutes to
respond).


I will also check the refund policy in such cases where the call center
operators have nothing better to do than pester us in the middle of the
night with test failures and other crank calls (by the way my current
system monitored the regional over-priced monopoly wakes us up all the
time with transmit failures in the middle of the night).

I truly must laugh at how transparently biased and agenda driven the
respondants post is. Makes me chuckle...