Alarming Idea for Telecom Vendors #IOT
Whenever I meet with a telecom manufacturer, one of my first questions is why they don’t get into the alarm business as an add-on. I have never heard a good reason why not.
The alarm panel industry is a sitting duck, just waiting for somebody to take over. The panels are stupid. Most of them were designed decades ago. Really, they just don’t do much. They are simple.
Basically, instead of a complicated telephone on a POE link, you would have a motion detector. Or, a door sensor.
There is no reason I know of that you can’t use standard ethernet wiring, and standard POE switches.
Alarm systems are trivial. The motion detector goes off and a message is sent to a monitoring service (or to the company security office.) That message might be a phone call using speech synthesis, or might be an SMS or an email.
The motion detectors are grouped into “partitions” and partitions are enabled or disabled by a keypad, or on a schedule.
I can see no reason that an Asterisk box couldn’t be easily modified to do all of these functions. Then, every telephone becomes the alarm keypad.
Is there any reason the telecom industry hasn’t simply absorbed the alarm industry? Or, are we so rigid in what is a telephone that we exclude motion sensors?
All that is required to take over alarm monitoring is a motion sensor and door sensor that uses POE. It could probably even communicate using SIP. Let’s do it!