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????

Reply to
blueman
Loading thread data ...

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.

Reply to
nick markowitz

RHC; Sir, you pose a valid and excellent question. Bottom line, no matter what anyone says, monitoring is pretty much the same wherever you get it, regardless of price. Provided you are capable and willing to look after your system yourself, there is no reason NOT to use the most reasonable monitoring station around. Especially so if all you need is the insurance certificate for home insurance reduction. However, in fairness, I have rarely ever found any end user competent enough to really understand the total functionality of his alarm system, so think that one through carefully.

As a professional dealer for 20 some years, I see the market laid out in different pricing segments as I will outline below. Firstly, know that basic professional monitoring is available to dealers everywhere from $1 to $3 monthly per account. All monies collected above pays for profit and the legitimate costs of running the dealers business, or goes into the high cost of running a large national organization.

Price category 1 - Monitoring sold directly to end users for $10 or less by the monitoring station with no dealer interface. This is the domain of the "cream skimmers" who provide only monitoring services but no direct service or warranty service, or sub it out to expensive subcontractors in various cities.

Price category 2 - Monitoring sold through dealers from $10 to $20 who throw in (usually) a measure of service and warranty, with or without a long term contract. This is usually the domain of small independent alarm companies (who are not usually well advertised in a given area, but hold about 85% of the North American market share).

Price category 3 - Monitoring sold through medium to larger alarm companies from $20 to $30 monthly, usually with a measure of service and warranty (often at additional monthly price), usually with a long term contract, often with reduced pricing up front..ie: :"free system", and often with national coverage

Price category 4 - Monitoring sold through the largest companies (such as ADT, Brinks etc), always with highly restrictive contracts from $30 to $40 monthly, and generally very expensive and sometimes with long service times.

Where an "end user" customer buys his monitoring services is largely a measure of how receptive he is to large advertising campaigns and the hype that goes with them (big national companies spend large amounts to garner exposure, knowing most consumers don't shop around very much). No matter how much larger companies and larger monitoring stations insist they offer "better response" times, there is much more to it than merely having a multitude of stations around, or even having them interconnected as does the largest company. Monitoring here in Canada is strictly ULC qualified, and all companies large and small must meet stringent standards to keep their insurance listing. I suspect it is the same in the US. It matters little whether you are a small independant monitoring station or a large national....by and large you as an end user can normally expect excellent service under most conditions of traffic volume. Nor does it matter whether the station is "local" to you or long distance - it's simply a phone call at its most basic level.

It is up to YOU, the knowledgeable consumer to make sure that whoever monitors your system, for whatever price, also follows these guidelines as a minimum:

1- Your panel must be programmed with an auto test signal to ensure it's continued functionality. 2- It is strongly recommended you have them activate in your panel (or in your case do it yourself), "cancel codes" to assist in preventing false dispatches 3- Get a guarantee the station will call your complete calling list before dispatching authorities at the end (larger companies only call one, or at most two numbers before dispatching)

I have found the truly best monitoring comes from some of the larger independant monitoring stations, but these are usually only provided to the end user through a legitimate dealer on their station. Remember, there is a lot of bullsh*t out there permeated by large and small dealers alike, and it can be pretty hard to know what's real and what's not. It is definately a "buyer beware" market at all levels, but more so for the uninformed consumer.

Like everywhere, in every market, for every service, it's up to the consumer to shop around !! If you wish to read further, my site may assist....www.homemetal.com.

Good luck !!

Reply to
tourman

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...

Reply to
blueman

That is the primary reason we have the system.

p> system, so think that one through carefully.

Valid point. However, the fact is that I actually know the system better than the senior techs at this large regional company. I use the dealer version of RemoteLink to access/program the DMP XR200 system. I have reverse-engineered much of the RemoteLink protocol and have written a range of perl scripts that allow me to do everything from send the local weather to the keyboard status line every half hour, to sending calendar reminders to the status line, to automatically arming and disarming the system with different bypass lists based on an arbitrarily-complex schedule (e.g., holidays, vacations, sunrise/sunset times). I can control my system via my cell phone by sending codes to my Linux server that then interface with the alarm via the RemotLink protocol. I actually have been tempted to distribute the Perl Library I wrote for this. Also, I have added and reprogrammed many sensors on my system.

Bottom line is that I am not worried about my ability to service the system on my end.

This seems to be the $8.95 type deal I am seeing.

This is the category of my current provider though they charge beyond the upper range you cite since my fee is $36/month. Moreover, this does

*not* include any service on my end. I have to pay premium hourly rates for any service call for labor plus materials. The service contract would add about an additional $15/month. Additionally, I paid full price labor and materials for installation up front (about $7000).

Clearly, I am being ripped off and to make matters worse the company has raised my rates 50% since I first signed on 6 years ago even as inflation has been nil. They cited all types of bogus reasons for increased costs while the true cost to service me has actually gone down since I switched from dial-up to Internet monitoring and the company itself has grown in scale by acquisition and consolidation.

Exactly, both my current provider and the ones that I am considering are UL certified. Thought the current provider claims some type of 5-star certification which I would doubt is a UL thing since UL doesn't usually give out gold stars :P Also, even my current provider only quotes a 30 second average response time which itself seems to be industry standard. Plus averages are just that - averages.

Yes - I know how to do that and how to set the interval on that. In fact, one of the issues with my current way over-priced providers is that we get frequent transmit trouble codes and I know the problem is not on my end (since I have tested by constantly pinging both the alarm company ip address and my panel). Yet, they want to charge me an hourly rate for a service call.

I know how to do that.

Good point. I also want to check that there is no charge on their end (not the fire/police) for false alarms if we accidentally trip something. We have kids and we get a bunch of those...

Can you list any nationally available or local to Boston area companies that you have heard good things about...

Thanks. Very helpful and seemingly unbiased approach! You have confirmed my assumptions.

Basically, if you don't care about money, don't have the time to look around, and are not very knowledgeable/capable of monitoring and servicing the home end of the system then by all means pay premium pricing.

If none of the above is true, then the monitoring itself is pretty much a commodity so go with a lower priced company with a good reputation.

Reply to
blueman

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...

Reply to
blueman

Just to clarify, I have a DMP XR200 system and I understand that not all monitoring companies cover DMP

Reply to
blueman

Sir, I cannot recommend any US based companies since I live and work in Canada.

Overall, it seems to me that you have pretty much answered your own questions. It seems you are making your own case to find a more reasonable source for your monitoring and dump your current obviously overpriced large company. I added my comments to help you appreciate how this industry works from the inside out. There is a place for all dealers of all sizes in this industry, even the overpriced ones. My comments are not intended to point the finger at any one company in particular; just the industry in general.

Based on your knowledge, you appear to know the right questions to ask.

Reply to
tourman

Yeah, but DMP can send other formats than DMP format. I thought you were an expert on it? I've got a bunch of DMP panels out there sending contact ID because it works better for the particular application.

Reply to
Bob La Londe

The bottom line is that alarm monitoring service is pretty much a commodity nowadays. The reality is there is little difference in the monitoring service if you pay $10 or $30 per month, the issues may come if you need maintenance or repair service.

We no longer provide service to fire or burglar alarm systems that we don't monitor and most service companies won't provide repair service to any system they don't monitor, or if they do then they charge a premium price for the service and don't attach any priority to it.

So, if you can handle the repair/service in-house, or are prepared to pay a premium for repair service and save a couple of hundred per year on monitoring, then take the lower cost monitoring, but be prepared to pay substantially more for repair service if and when it is required.

We charge $35 a month for fire alarm monitoring and make no excuses for not being the lowest price, do you get better monitoring service with us than a $10 per month company, probably not. What you get is a prompt, reliable response when you need service or repair, something you are unlikely to get with the lower priced monitoring service

Doug

Reply to
doug

All of what you say makes sense and you certainly have the right to charge whatever the market bears in our capitalist sytem. I would do the same if I were in your situation.

For me the alarm system is pretty simple to diagnose/repair. Heck the XR200 panel still uses a Z80 CPU and I was designing and building computers with that processer 30 years ago.

In any case, the current company doesn't really fix much themselves anyway - they just swap parts. These parts are readily available online for a fraction of the cost they charge anyway. I don't even mind going for a few days without service. My house is over 200 years old and survived fine for its first 200 years without any alarms or monitoring.

By the way, the current company which installed the system did a pretty crappy job in some areas with a number of the connections just twisted together rather than soldered or connected with a solderless connector. After a few years, I started getting faults which I tracked down to these bad junctions. A little blob of solder fixed it all.

Bottom line though is that if you know simple electronics and computer programmming, alarms are actually quite simple...

Just out of curiosity, does your $35/month include service or is that an extra charge?

Reply to
blueman

Yes I am aware of that but my preference was to stick with DMP format. Maybe I should reconsider.

Does one lose any granularity of information in using another format?

By the way, I didn't claim to be an expert on any or all aspects of DMP. I said that I know the panel better than the senior techs at the current company. They just know what they are taught and what they use day-to-day and there is frequent turnover. It's not rocket science and the techs are not engineers by any stretch of the imagination.

Reply to
blueman

RHC: Just a side note to my last post; in any industry, the vast majority of shoppers don't want to bother fiddling with their purchases. In our industry, most buyers barely know what make and model of alarm system they have, let alone know what makes up good overall service to them. They bought it because they feel they need it, not want it, so their after market perspective is somewhat different. They trust their dealer to do that job for them as they should (trust IS the overriding factor here). So the industry responds with various levels of product and service availiblity and pricing, just as it should. So the customer can decide who he wants to deal with, how much he wants to pay, and the terms of purchase for his security needs.

My main beef with the security industry is that few if any alarm companies advise clients of the simple, no cost and low cost things they should also do, plus the all important physical security precautions that MUST be taken to ensure an adequate, OVERALL level of security. Simply pushing electronic solutions because that's all they sell, and not advising clients of all the necessary precautions, is incompetent at best and dishonest at worst. As professionals, our industry should be selling SECURITY, not just monitoring contracts !!

For 15 years before I got into this industry formally, I specialized in physically securing homes against break in. I did thousands of homes, and to my knowledge, never did one of my clients have a break in after that. Several customers were attacked, but nothing came of it. It's not rocket science; only common sense in most cases. Nor does it cost much, and has no ongoing costs.

Sir, to this point, you seem to have thought out very well the intricacies of monitoring services; you might want to do the same for the physical secuirty of your home.

Reply to
tourman

The $35 is what we charge for Commercial Fire Alarm monitoring, it does not include service.

We charge $22 for Residential monitoring, again that does not include service.

We don't have any residential accounts where service is included, but the $36 that you are paying is inline with what some of our commercial customers pay for burg monitoring with repair service included

Commercial burg monitoring rates vary depending on if service is included and if service is included then the cost would depend on the size and complexity of the system.

Doug

Reply to
doug

from experience, CRIMP those connections, else 1 - 10 years you'll see false alarms again. I soldered some of my connections with the most beautiful, perfect twist and solder wicking ever done, protected inside home, yet 10 years they started failing!

You see, I did NOT listen to the 'uneducated' installers who had told me 'crimp is better than solder', after all, I was skilled design engineer educated at university and I knew better, NOT! Lesson: Experience is the best education to learn about reliability. Go back and make those connections gas sealed pressure type connections and they will last longer than you.

Regarding your 200 year old house, concentrate on the fire alarm/ monitoring. From experience living in 100year old home, that wood dries out to the point of burning as fast as gun powder. seriously fast fire potential, plus they didn't seem to put fire blocks in the walls like today.

Just a note on service, I measure the service by whether I can REACH a person, with a name and authority. If I can't reach a person, they're blacklisted as a vendor.

Reply to
Robert Macy

Didn't see a way to give you feedback on your website...

the page you referenced says, "Click above to learn how to PROPERLY secure your home or business from the detailed article which is part of this website."

Uh, ...are your articles REALLY that dangerous? ;)

Reply to
Robert Macy

RHC: Only to incompetent alarm companies....:))

Reply to
tourman

My thoughts also.......... My TROLL Detector has been activated and is in "Alarm Condition".......... I KNOW DMP doesn't deal with homeowners at all, this guy's BS is hard to swallow and smell......

Reply to
Russell Brill

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.

Nick, Are you trying to scare people again??? Oh, BTW I thought you were dead... Don't know where I got that idea from?????? Here's the answer I LOVE to give the self monitoring folks when they call with a broken alarm, "Call your current provider and schedule a service visit, what they just monitor your system, that's too bad you're not my customer because I monitor and do repair for MY CUSTOMERS"....... :-)

Russ

Reply to
Russell Brill

Come to think of it, I can save lots of money on my IT needs by doing business with companies that get rid of their high paid North American employees and outsource everything to some third world country... After all, a computer is a computer, and software is software :-)

Reply to
Russell Brill

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.