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Looking for continuous, encrypted central station alarm monitoring with line cut detection

When I was installing Ademco Alarms in the late 70's, it was quite common to install dedicated line,dc reversing relay, and central station monitoring. This was in the days when the central alarm monitoring station was in the local area of the town itself, or sometimes even at the police station. One of these panels was briefly featured in the old Clint Eastwood movie "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot". It had a DC ammeter and a 'line trouble' lamp for each account module.

As I return to to the alarm business these days, times have certainly changed. The dedicated lines seem to not be used quite as often (maybe because of the expense and complexity in dealing with the phone co?) Apparently, POTS dialers are used in most alarms and almost all police departments require permits, separate alarm monitoring companies, etc.

Here's my question - Back in the 70's, Admeco had a super-secure and encrypted central station that would alert the attendant to line cuts and could not be defeated by the spoofing techniques that Jim Belushi used in the movie "Thief" (i.e. inserting DC power supplies in the telephone/alarm lines).

Is there an equivalent of this system today? That is...

  1. Requires continuous duplex communications over a dedicated phone line.
  2. Passes encrypted and verified data back and forth to minimize intruder 'spoofing' attempts.
  3. In addition to alarm notification, it alerts the operator to line cuts or when someone is otherwise tampering with the phone line.

When I search for Ademco on the Internet these days, I get redirected to Honeywell sites. Did Honeywell buy Ademco?

Any information greatly appreciated!

Beachcomber

Reply to
Beachcomber
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I installed those units back in the day. They were variations of polarity reversing modules. For grade AA line security they used a pseudo random code. You could hang a butt set and actually hear it. There were more complex setups for line security from other vendors at the time, it's just that ADEMCO was what was available to most anyone. Potter Direct Wire , McCullough Loops. Morse Polling Computers, Twin Tron were some of the vendors from that time and most used solid copper circuits.

An example of what is used today for line security would be this: The D6600 NetCom System uses the new National Institute of Standards and Technology/ Advanced Encryption Standard (NIST/AES) Rijndael encryption algorithm, meeting U.S. Government requirements for high security Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) using data networks for alarm communications. This multiple award-winning system has been an industry leader, becoming the first product that uses the Internet for alarm communications to receive an Underwriters Laboratories Listing for use in UL 864 Commercial Fire Alarm System applications. This listing makes it possible for many thousands of networked commercial locations to eliminate the expense of telephone lines that are dedicated to the central station fire signaling system. The D6600 NetCom System is also listed for use in UL 1610 Grade AA Burglary and Line Supervision applications.

Reply to
Roland Moore
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POTS is certainly the most common communication path, but the industry is slowly waking up to the fact that more and more households cancel their old-fashion analog lines, and use cellphones or VoIP.

*snip*

Honeywell (yes, they acquired Ademco '99) still runs AlarmNet. AlarmNet is encrypted from the communicator back to Honeywell's central station, but from there it's routed back to the alarm CS through regular POTS using ContactID.

*snip*

We have a general purpose communicator/controller that uses AES over both POTS;

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It's more geared towards industrial monitoring/remote control, but could also work as an add-on to an existing controller, or with some DIY spirit you could put some burg logic in it;)

Reply to
Anders

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