Monitoring station response time

Don't forget Exit Errors. Although we do call on an exit error, some company's may not, or may drop call back to a lower priorty.

Our call back time is under 60 secs.

| > I checked on my watch as the alarm system released the phone line and then | > waited for a phone call from the monitoring station. It took 3 minutes | > and 18 seconds for the phone to ring. | >

| > Their excuse for the delay is that they were busy. | >

| > What is considered a maximum acceptable response time when phoning a | > residence following an alarm? | >

| |

This morning I my alarm system was triggered. Fortunately it was a false alarm, no damage or injury occurred.

I checked on my watch as the alarm system released the phone line and then waited for a phone call from the monitoring station. It took 3 minutes and 18 seconds for the phone to ring.

Their excuse for the delay is that they were busy.

What is considered a maximum acceptable response time when phoning a residence following an alarm?

Verys on size of central station and were its located

3 minutes is unexceptable to me. Central station i use usually 1 to 2 min max . unless they are extremely busy due to massive thunder storm etc. sub contacting for some companys have seen them take 20 minutes for a fire system totally unexceptable.

Hay Warren, just be glad you don't use the company we have, (Greenville MS) they took 9 days to tell us they were shut down, and only then after we started bitching about fail to communicate from our customers. RTS

If you are careful about the code, there is no reason to fear an active duress code. However, if you like most people, and don't remember much about your system over time, it is far too easy to use the duress code to disarm with the resultant false dispatch. My Central Station tells me they have NEVER had an instance where a duress alarm was real (Ottawa). In Los Angeles however, I'm sure that wouldn't be the case.

Personally, I never program a duress code unless the customer specifically asks for it up front, and then only with a stern warning about what can happen in a real world situation.

RHC

The panel has a duress code programmed. I can think of no reason not to have one.

My alarm company recently changed to a new monitoring station and the response wait times have become considerably longer. The panel is not programmed to send a cancel code. If it were I wouldn't be concerned about several minute wait for a double check or confirmation call.

I will be talking to the alarm company on Monday for an explanation. This is the second long delay I've experienced with the monitoring company. Last time I phoned them after four minutes to say I was still alive, only to be put on hold until they could check up on things.

The panel has a duress code programmed. I can think of no reason not to have one.

R.H.Campbell wrote:

The response was excessive for normal response. They may be having manpower problems caused by the importing of your dealer's information. Try it from time to time. If it is a national station, they might well be overwhelmed with alarm activity from the Texas/Louisiana areas being hit by the hurricane.... Rita and Katrina.

Occasionally they may just be too busy to call you more quickly, but it should be the exception, not the rule. If you are not happy, talk to the dealer. He will have some pull with the central station as he is a new customer. By the way, do you know what central station he is using? Also, where do you live? (I see a candadian address).

Regards, Allan

The changeover happened about three months ago. The monitoring station is Mammoth security in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is a local station on the other side of the city from me. The dealer will be getting a phone call on Monday as a follow up on my email today.

I can't see it being a weather or power related problem as it is a perfectly nice day, no storms or anything else out of the ordinary. It would be very doubtful that the Texas/Louisiana situation would have any effect on the station.

Allan Waghalter wrote:

And that also speaks to the advantage of having a local area CS. We know when bad weather is coming, we know what areas tend to have powerfails or flooding, so we can staff appropriately.

For about 5 years I had a second redundant cs in another state where we could switch to instantly, all records were backed up nightly...never ever had to use it.

I wonder what ADT does with 8 zillion alarms if their cs goes down?

Central station response time is a daily issue with me. I manage Monitoring America Alarm Co-Op.

Response time is measured from the time we receive the alarm signal to the time a dispatcher has it on their screen for processing. Our average response time on a burglary alarm signal is about 16 seconds. The time necessary to make the call to the location may run another 30 seconds depending on telephone companies. All in all, we want the phone at the location to be ringing within 60 seconds of the receipt of the alarm signal.

Now, what was describes is under normal conditions. Central station staffing is difficult. If you over staff, you are wasting money on unnecessary personnel. If you under staff, your response times go up. We watch our response times under normal circumstances and staff accordingly. We have recently increased our dispatcher staffing by one person between the hours of 07:00 - 23:00 Monday - Saturday. We staff lighter on Sunday and graveyard.

We have an advantage over most central stations, we are a ?not for profit? business. We are a cooperative and owned by our customers, the alarm dealers. Our focus is on service, not profit. We are overstaffed according to most central stations managers. Our daytime dispatchers work about 60% of their 8 hour shift. They are waiting for the phone to ring or an alarm to occur the other 40% of the time. Our evening shift reports about the opposite, work 40%, wait 60%. Graveyard works even less. Since our owners are also our customers, this is what they want.

Since we monitor coast to coast we are effected by various weather conditions. We get thunderstorms from across the country, hurricanes from the Southeast and various other conditions elsewhere. We can never be staffed the way we would like during these weather situations. Our response times will go up during these types of conditions. However, these situations occur for short durations a few times a year. The worst part storms is that response times are delayed in areas not directly effected by the storm.

We do modify our procedures in what we call storm mode. We follow the call list through authority dispatch and then put the incident on hold. We continue this until we have dispatched on all pending events. We then go back and continue the call lists to notify respondents. Sometimes respondents are annoyed the call to them too as long as it did but generally when we explain why they understand. In the grand scheme of things, storms are a pain in the a** but not a big deal.

If you experience long response times on a normal basis perhaps you should look for another central station.

So then,to sum that up, it seems as if your definte and unequivocal opinion is ..... that it's not a disadvantage to have a local central station ..... or it is.

Unless of course the levy breaks and floods your station... You're also subject to mandatory evacuation orders... In this particular instance, having a "local station" wouldn't be all that "advantageous". Personally, if a disaster like this struck, I'd wanna get outta there anyway... Ain't no point in "dispatching the police" to a break-in when there ain't no police to dispatch.

:-))

I thought they were consolidating a few years back, dint that happen?

| > I wonder what ADT does with 8 zillion alarms if their cs goes down? | | ADT has multiple central stations | |

ADT has multiple central stations

Some of them yes but they still do have several

Sure you can, how often are centrals affected in Florida? Compare that to somewhere in the mid/south west?

Also a "local" central station is generally smaller with, in my opinion, lower-grade equipment

Actually the best sample is a mixture of both... Having unmanned CS localized and all of these stations connected to 1 major station. This would be very flexible in all terms. And it would also be very cost effective.

On the other hand most monitoring stations have an action plan. Make sure to get a hold of the action plan. You would see that they would most probably have a diagram that says "restore code received?... Yes->Lower priority No->Higher priority" So you would be receiving your cs call a little later than usual. The reason that they would have said that "they were busy" would be due to the fact that your acount was pushed down in the priority list.

As the guy from weis.net explained.. it takes 16 seconds for the signal to be received via telco. it takes on average another 30 seconds for the confirmation and the telefon call. So normally it should be in the

60 sec range. But for a cs the average response time is approx. 70 sec. The average action time is approx. 120 sec. This is the time that the signal is received to the time where the event is saved into the database.

To really test a system you should give for example a silent alarm and click on the chronometer. Do not disarm the system until you get the call. Then you should be able to measure a better response time.

Good luck.

That is a bit long - I work in a comparitively small monitoring centre in New Zealand and I do know that even once the alarm has hung up from the receiver - there is a short delay of may 10-15 seconds for the monitoring software to perform the lookups.

In an alarm case: client details, event template, zone before generating an activation on-screen. This time can vary depending on the signal traffic (note: be kind, dont flood your CS with runaway signals).

However we endeavour to achieve or better the NZSA (NZ Security Association) guidelines depending upon the type of activation. These are broken into several priorities and response times begin once the activation is displayed by the monitoring software:

High Priority: Maximum time to commence response 1 minute i. Duress / panic: Possibly forced to disarm alarm or suspicious person seen ii. Hold-up alarm: Person(s) demanding money/property with threats of violence. iii. Raid alarm: Person(s) demanding money/property with threats of violence. iv. Fire alarm: Alarm from dedicated fire detection equipment v. Medical alarms

Asset Threatening: Maximum time to commence response 3 minutes i. Intruder/Tamper alarm: Security system alert including space, glass break, and door detectors, ii. Plant alarm: Includes temperature alarms, equipment stoppage alerts iii. System failure: Battery fail, isolates and trouble alarms

Schedule violations: Maximum time to commence response 20 minutes i. Irregular open: Alarm disarmed outside scheduled hours ii. Late to open: Alarm not disarmed by designated open time iii. Early close: Alarm armed before scheduled close time iv. Late to close: Alarm failed to arm by scheduled close time

Subsistence / System alarms: Maximum time to commence response 60 minutes i. Power failure: Power to the alarm system has been lost ii. Failed Timer Test: Scheduled test signal not received

Luckily we use a modern system backed by SQL - whereas older stations will find it difficult to process signals quickly with old software and hardware.