Hi, DIYers, I'm George from Alarm Grid.
Today, I'm going to be going over
what happens to an IQ 2 or an IQ 2 Plus
when the internet goes down or disconnects from your Wi-Fi.
So the first thing we want to go in and touch base on
is going over what actually is in the IQ
2, what's built into it, what communicators does it use.
So first of all, the IQ 2 or the IQ 2 Plus
does not use phone line.
And the only other two paths of communication
that alarm system use besides phone line
would be a Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection
or a cellular connection.
Now, the IQ 2 and the IQ 2 Plus, they only
have two providers available and that's AT&T or Verizon.
Now, when choosing the IQ 2 system, a lot of people
think, oh, well, I have AT&T on my phones
or vice versa, I have Verizon on my phones,
do I need to choose the Verizon or AT&T
panel because of my cell phone.
No.
The only thing you really need to pay attention
to whenever you're trying to decide which
IQ 2 version to get is whichever one
has better signal in your area.
So if I have AT&T and I'm in my house,
and I know my AT&T signal is not good in my house,
I would not recommend buying an AT&T panel
because you know that your AT&T's service is not
good in the house.
So you might want to try Verizon.
Easiest way to test which one has better signal in your area
is if you have AT&T or if your friends, family members,
or anyone has the other provider, Verizon,
you want to test out both.
Just have somebody with either provider come to the house,
stand around maybe for 10, 15 seconds,
check the signal on the phone, and see
what the bars are set to.
Usually anywhere between three to four bars is great,
two to three bars is OK, and then one bar,
that's kind of almost getting there to that line.
So you always want to make sure that you're just
checking to see what service has better air signal in that area.
It doesn't matter who you guys use for your phone.
The cellular communicator is just
for the alarm system on its own.
Now, one other thing you have to keep in mind
is that the panel has Wi-Fi cellular built in.
And if the Wi-Fi goes down, that's
OK because the panel still has cellular
which is usually more reliable.
You normally don't have issues with your phone
where a cellular tower goes down,
and then you can't use your phone.
There might be issues with signal strength,
but again, the panel's not moving around.
It's staying in one location, and as long
as that location has good signal, you should be fine.
Now, Wi-Fi on the other hand is, we're all
not strangers to Wi-Fi issues.
Everyone, every now and then, you have to go to your router,
reboot it, leave it over 30 seconds, turn it back on,
reconnect all the devices, DHCP or Static IP,
there's different things that can happen with the Wi-Fi.
So in the event that Wi-Fi does go down on the panel, the IQ 2,
actually when it's using dual path monitoring, which
it actually needs to have cellular enabled by the way,
if you guys are looking into activating the IQ 2 Plus.
You always are going to need to have cellular enabled in order
to get the IQ 2 monitored .
So the way that this works is whenever an alarm goes off
or a command is being sent or a command is being sent
from the panel to the Alarm.com servers, the signal gets
sent at the same time through the Wi-Fi
and through the cellular path.
Then, what Alarm.com does is whichever one it receives
first, which is usually just a millisecond difference,
whichever one Alarm.com receives first,
that's the command that it's going to use.
More often, the system will obviously
be faster through Wi-Fi.
So Alarm.com would normally receive
the Wi-Fi signals faster than the cellular signals.
But what happens when the Wi-Fi goes down, does your system
stop working, does it not report to the station,
or to the alarm monitoring station,
can you not control it from the application.
Well, the answer to these things is the system
will still work as it was working on Wi-Fi because it
has the cellular LTE, which is more reliable than Wi-Fi
and never has up or downs really.
I'm not going to say never, but it's rare
that cellular towers are ever down.
But, yeah, if the Wi-Fi goes down on the system,
the system will still send out signals
through the cellular path.
It will still be able to receive commands and send out commands
through the cellular path.
You guys can still use Alarm.com to control the system
through the cellular path.
Everything stays exactly the same.
Your system is just not connected to the Wi-Fi.
Now, the panel won't notify you if the Wi-Fi is down.
There is not really any Wi-Fi supervision.
There are ways that you can check
to see if the Wi-Fi is down.
The first way would be simply to go
to the gray bar at the very top.
It's a little right above the date and time.
So when I click on that, you should
see in the top right corner.
Now you have a battery icon, a Wi-Fi icon,
and a Bluetooth icon and a cellular reception icon.
If I hit on my Wi-Fi, it'll show Wi-Fi connected Alarm Grid,
and it'll say that my connection is good.
Now obviously if you see a big X around there,
then you know that your Wi-Fi is not connected.
And then the second way to check if you're connected,
would be to actually go into the Wi-Fi configuration, which
would be going hitting the gray bar, go into the settings.
From there, you would want to go ahead and make your way over
to advanced settings.
You're going to want to use either the installer
code or the dealer code.
I'm going to use my installer code which
is defaulted at 1111.
And then, from there, I can just hit Wi-Fi,
and you can actually see there.
It's very important if you guys are
looking to connect to Wi-Fi that this little checkmark is
checked.
If that check mark is empty, you will actually not
see any Wi-Fi networks appear on the panel.
And then, you just have to enable it.
Wi-Fi networks will pop up.
You can connect it using WPS, you can add a Wi-Fi network,
or find your network name on here, and just
type in the password.
So mine's connected, so I'm just going to back on out of there.
But, yeah, so the panel will, again, it's
going to work normally the way that it was working
when it was connected to Wi-Fi.
Nothing changes if you lose Wi-Fi.
If you lose Wi-Fi and cellular, then yes,
that you will actually get notified on
because now your panel has no way of communicating alarm
signals.
And that's always a great risk because if anybody breaks in
while both paths are down, then it's
possible that the alarm signal was never sent.
So again it's rare that this ever
happens because cellular is very reliable
and the cell towers rarely ever go down.
So if you guys have more questions
on the dual path monitoring for the system.
If you guys have an IQ 2 and are looking to get it monitored.
And you want to know about Alarm.com plans,
if you want to find out more about how
the Wi-Fi and the cellular networks
work on the IQ 2 panel, feel free to drop us
an email to support@alarmgrid.com.
If you found the video helpful, make sure
that you hit like underneath, subscribe to our YouTube
channel, and hit the little bell icon to enable notifications
so that way when we upload new videos, you guys get notified.
All right, I'm George, and I'll see you guys next time.