Telephones Out US West Coast?

Next alarm I believe contracts some or all its service to GMS in Long Beach, CA, since Long Beach is in the 562 area code its very likely that they were down this morning.

Doug L

Doug L wrote:

NextAlarm has no backup contingency? tsk tsk.

| > This sounds like nonsense. First, the "Internet" cannot be "out" in any | > particular region. It's just doesn't function like that. Second, I cannot | > find a single mention of a disruption of telephone service in the US for | > this morning. | >

|

Not only that but radio and cellular back up is mostly for the premise lines, not the CS lines, if the signal is delivered from the radio tower/cellular provider by land lines to the CS then they will be affected by the outage also. In the case of DSC/Surguard Skyroute/connect 24 the signals are retransmitted over land lines to the same receiver lines as the digital communicator.

Doug L

Nomen Nescio wrote:

This morning my NextAlarm service was out for about 6 or 7 hours. Neither my alarm nor my regular service could get through. Later they came back up with the story that telephone and Internet service was disrupted on the West Coast and that the outage was beyond their control.

This sounds like nonsense. First, the "Internet" cannot be "out" in any particular region. It's just doesn't function like that. Second, I cannot find a single mention of a disruption of telephone service in the US for this morning.

Actually it DOES function like that sometimes in fact a week ago a couple of ISP/VOIP providers blocked access to various parts of the net for certain areas of the country due to a billing dispute.

All right, I'll bite: if your local phone company (or LD provider) has a massive outage, how exactly do you have a backup for your digital receivers? Sure, people can pay extra for radio or whatever, but what do you do for the people who only have a dialer if your receiver lines are down?

- badenov

With NextAlarm I don't think this was the case. The underlying network simply re-routes around faulty servers. From what others have said there could easily have been a phone outage in NextAlarm's area, but seem to suggest that their VoIP and related services were also down for reasons beyond their control. Maybe, but ...

I am going to try for a fuller explanation from NextAlarm. I have had the service since Jan 2005, and have had no issues. Of course I have also had no incidents at my home that might have provided a real test. I am not quite comfortable with how this particular problem was handled.

Subject: Re: Telephones Out US West Coast? Newsgroup: alt.security.alarms => Nomen Nescio All right, I'll bite: if your local phone company (or LD provider) has a

Doesn't big blue have the ability to re-route the toll-free dialer numbers to other central's?

Nor should you be. While nothing happened to you, another customer may not have faired quite so well...

Yes assuming they have contracted with another company to do backup

Not always, while the internet sends packets all over the net to it's destination they still can be affected by an outage in a certain area. That said however it could indeed be NextAlarm.

An example of an internet outage can be found here..

These 2 companies have been squabbling for a couple of weeks now and that has caused outages in specific areas

You might want to visit

They have countless users having VOIP problems, it's not yet as reliable as a standard phone line and if it was the VOIP provider that had a problem it's not NextAlarm's fault.

BTW: By looking at that panel on

it appears to be a slightly altered Visonic PowerMax which is a standard alarm panel.

We had a contractor take out 3 fiber optic and a 1000 pair coper cable here in pennhils and has taken phone service out to plum monrovile and penn hills and it happened satuday and phoneswill notbe fully restored till friday

It appears that the outage on the West Coast was beyond the control of NextAlarm. In suggesting that "Internet service was out" I presume they mean that dial-up connections were disrupted and that some VoIP service was affected. This makes more sense than did their original message to me.

Meanwhile, where was their backup? Is there not a requirement that UL listed services must maintain a backup communications system?

Hey Armond, since next alarm does not monitor alarms, what would an outage have to do with them? Since your alarm is being monitored elsewhere, would the CA outage lets say, stop a call to New Jersey? Do you even know who's monitoring your alarm and where or did you just fall for a sales pitch without checking? Oh I forgot, it's everyone else fault and not the customer, they don't need to be responsible for nothing.

Get off it, you know exactly what I'm asking!

You just don't know the answer, do you?

Bet you really though next alarm was an alarm monitoring company with dispatchers and all.

My Question is: If you were operating a CS And you did have a Backup Scenario. For Instance Forwarding all your calls to another CS. How would you forward those calls if The entire network in the area was down? If the switching equipment is inoperative at the CO, How would they forward your calls????

If you can figure out how to ask a serious question, I promise I'll consider responding.

It would be forwarded by the telco not the CS

I think you're missing the point. If the telco has experienced this kind of major outage, then:

(a) How are you going to get in touch with the right people at your local telco to make the arrangements? Carrier pigeon?

(b) Assuming the problem is massive enough to wipe out phone service to a large area, why would you expect the telco to be able to honor your request to forward calls?

- badenov