I have a landline at the house only for my alarm. I have to have a landline for this, VoIP won't work because I'm not going to depend on Time Warner to keep the internet up at all times. ATT is charging me $45 a month for unlimited local calling with caller id. $15 of fees, federal and local taxes, which is utter bullshit. 50% tax on my phone bill!!!
Who do you use, any suggestions on alternative phone corps?

 

Many telcos offer barebones landlines, but they won't advertise it. You may try calling back and telling them you want strictly a bare landline with no voice services, and see if they will work with you on it.

 

I'm not sure how it works, but Smith Thompson security clams a landline is not needed and you can have your alarm monitored by them for under 20 bucks. Call the owner Mark Thompson, he's a good guy.

Personally, I don;t have my alarm monitored, it just makes noise and should be enough to scare the average criminal off. If that doesn't work, my 12 ga. should do it...

 

I would think a landline for an alarm is just as bad as using VoIP since it is easy to cut the phone line on the side of the house before breaking in. A cellular based system seems like a better option.

 

+1. Most security companies offer the cellular as a "backup" option for landlines. In your case, you'd just use the cellular as the "primary". I think it's about a $10-20/month option, depending on your provider, so that should be cheaper than the $45 phone bill.


BTW... to TypeSH (and others)... cutting the phone/data line is not the reason that VoIP isn't supported by alarm companies. The reasons are:
1) I suspect the alarm device uses a transmission similar to a Fax/modem to communicate with the alarm company. Due to compression/encoding used by VoIP protocol, the communication may not be supported/reliable. Faxes are also no supported on regular VoIP connections.
2) VoIP relies on power to the home. If your power is cut (or out for whatever reason), a standard phone line will still work but a VoIP line will not. The likelihood of a service outage (due to bad weather or too many people running their AC simultateously, or whatever) is much smaller with telephone than with VoIP.
3) IP is a best-effort service. "Best-effort" isn't good enough when your life may depend on it. POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is almost 100% reliable. How many times have you picked up your phone and not gotten a dial tone? Now, compare that to the number of times that you haven't been able to connect to google.

 

I am working on that. I haven't had the money for a number of reasons but......
you can pay an independent telco contractor to run your telephone box into the garage so that there is no external wire on the house. It's buried under the ground then drops off to the box in your garage. Then a thief can't cut the line.

If my line gets cut by anyone my alarm company is instantly notified and I'll get a phone call within 30 seconds with them asking if I should send in the 5.0

 

While a lot of these points are valid, some are false information.

I think it is more accurate to say HOME VoIP service is just not what it should be. It is developed to take very little transmission speeds away so that it will work on DSL as well. Most businesses use a VoIP solution with a dynamically assigned T1 or faster connection (basically, their internet is a T1 and as the phone system needs more lines it assigns bandwidth from that T1 connection solely for each line.)

Business faxes are then connected to an ATA box, which allows a standard phone to connect to the same VoIP connection. So Fax + VoIP does work, if your equipment is allowed to allocate the proper bandwidth required.

Some home VoIP solutions DO offer fax services, because they enable you to disable the bandwidth saving feature (link) when dialing from your fax machine.

"Best-effort" is good enough... because it works. It's my understanding that once your phone line gets to the local telco switching box, it's transfered to a VoIP type solution anyway... it may be a private network, but it's really not all that different. The internet is reliable, as long as you are using a brand that you can trust to have redundency in their servers so they have no outages, even if they lose a site.

Power outages: Get a battery backup for $40 or w/e at fry's. Power your modem, router and ATA (VoIP adapter) on it, which will give it hours of opperation in a power outage.
-Doug

 

^ Regarding the fax thing, that's exactly what I said. Faxes don't work on regular VoIP connections because of the compression/encoding. But, yes, most VoIP providers do offer a Fax-compatible package that's not as compressed (or maybe not compressed at all, I don't know the details). I guess I should've been clearer in indicating that you could upgrade to a Fax-supported package (or according to the link you provided just punch in a secret code, or use a later-release adapter), but most people's standard home VoIP connection isn't designed to support fax transmissions.

That's one of the same reasons that it's not designed to support the alarm system. I'm pretty sure that the alarm system uses an analog modem type of device to connect to the alarm monitoring service and report the trouble. Analog modems are also not generally compatible with VoIP, due to the compression/encoding algorithms used.

I've never tried it, but I suspect you wouldn't get a very good connection if you tried using your analog 56K modem to connect to the internet through a VoIP box. Of course, if you are running VoIP over a broadband connection, it wouldn't make much sense to use an analog-modem, anyway... but we'll just disregard that little point.


Interesting sidenote, my VoIP provider (Lingo) allows you to configure a "High Quality" setting on your VoIP connection. In this configuration, I believe it actually uses 128Kbps for your voice connection, which provides even better audio quality than a standard phone line (since standard phones use 64 or 56Kbps). Unfortunately, you have to be talking to another Lingo customer to take full advantage of the High Quality setting, and I don't actually know anyone that uses Lingo.

 

AT&T sucks. I just got their DSL service and it's sooooo much slower than the Verizon service my GF had less than 10 miles away (They have the area divided up into regions and the ONLY DSL option I have is AT&T). The average speed is maybe 100-300k/s - which is fine - but often it bogs down and is more like 30k/s or less.

Regarding bare bones phone service - the cheapest I was able to get phone service (no add-ons) before the DSL switch was about $35/month after taxes... remember there are always $10-$15 worth of taxes on any phone service )

 

Well my point was that it does support analog lines as long as it has the same clarity as a standard line, or better. Also you can't have any lags and such. Most of what you said is probably "best practice", but it is doable if you get somebody that knows what they're doing.

I did however check out the smith thompson cell thing and that does seem to be the way to go, since I already use them and all I'm just going to call them and have them send it out to me

Thanks Tommy for starting the thread and Phantom for pointing that out to me (us).

Also, to anybody looking at setting up an alarm system that's monitored, go ahead and get the fire alarm option, it costs like less than $200 and it's another discount on your homeowners insurance (I get 5% off for security and 7% for fire.. 12%, not too shabby!) Not to mention the extra protection your home and your family get.