Alarm Services
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22 March, 2024
Despite the UK 2025 PSTN switch-off, many telecare and other critical alarm services still use ISDN to feed alarm data, via multiple phone lines, into alarm receiving (ARC) or monitoring centres.
For those ARC platform providers that many years ago chose the ISDN technology and hardware-based media servers to receive alarm calls, unsuccessful alarm calls are becoming an emerging problem. With the current mix of analogue and digital technologies used in the telecare network environment many alarm calls fail – either because the alarm information is not properly received by the ARC, or the alarm call simply don’t reach the ARC at all.
To further complicate the problem, the alarm receivers once made for ISDN were built into a monolithic software structure, with hardware-based media servers handling the alarms. This old-fashioned building structure makes it difficult to address the problem with unsuccessful alarm calls in an easy and cost-efficient manner.
This blogpost dives deeper into the problem of unsuccessful alarm calls caused by the mixed analogue and digital environment and looks at what providers can do to tackle it.
The majority of telecare devices in Europe are analogue, and at the time these were introduced in the market they fitted well with the legacy ARC platforms and the analogue telecom networks (PSTN) using ISDN technology. The entire telecare communication system was built for analogue equipment and networks.
In the future everything will be built for digital systems, and digital telecare devices will communicate over digital telecom networks with digital ARC platforms. Some markets in Europe, such as us in the Nordics, are close to this environment.
However today, and for probably another 5-8 years, we will have a mixture of analogue and digital devices, running on analogue and digital telecom networks, and communicating with legacy analogue and/or modern digital ARC platforms.
During this time of mixed analogue/digital environment it’s going to be challenging for alarm service providers to ensure successful transmission of alarm calls, resulting in an increased number of unsuccessful alarm calls.
Most of today’s care-alarm receivers are built for the all-analogue world and not prepared for today’s telecom environment with multiple operators and digital networks. An alarm call might travel through several operators’ networks on the journey from the device to the ARC. Add to this that the alarm receivers are built into monolithic ARC platforms, making them hard to upgrade to modern needs.
To successfully receive alarms calls, it must be possible to easily adapt the alarm receivers in such a way they can compensate for the problems arising under these new mixed environment conditions.
With a cloud-native communication platform such as the iotcomms.io, there is no hardware dependencies, and the possibilities to make instantaneous adjustments or updates are practically limitless. Its micro service design removes the hurdles of monolithic and closed systems, and the ultra-modern cloud technologies make it possible to tweak, and thus compensate for the alarm call challenges occurring in a mixed analogue/digital telco environment between telecare devices and ARCs.
By directing the analogue alarms to the iotcomms.io platform services the problems with unsuccessful alarm calls can be tackled in a smooth manner. In addition to tackling the problems with unsuccessful alarm calls the analogue alarms can be delivered to the ARC platform in the preferred digital format, for example SCAIP or NOW-IP protocols, or by API integration.
iotcomms.io’s deep expertise in analogue and digital alarm protocols and networks, has made it possible to build a cutting edge cloud platform that puts ARC platform providers in the best possible position to easily, quickly and cost efficiently tackle the problems occurring in these mixed environments.
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