Hey, DIYers, I'm Jorge from Alarm Grid.
Today, we're going to be going over what
is phone line monitoring.
Back in a day, every home used to come with a phone line,
right?
If you're already paying for the phone line,
why not use it to send out alarm signals?
So a lot of these alarm systems had phone line connections.
Even the ones that are made to this day
still have phone line connection.
It's not as widely used as before,
but there are still some panels out there
that do allow you to use phone line monitoring.
Now, for instance, this Vista panel
here, it has the last four terminals there still
for a phone line.
This is still a widely used system.
A lot of people still use it.
Now the thing about phone line, which was a back in the day,
like I said, you were paying for it anyway.
So a lot of people figured, hey, why not just
use it for the alarm system to send out signals?
Another good thing about the phone line back in the day
was that it was by law, FCC required, all phone lines
to be powered to the phone line company that
had their own backup batteries.
So even if the house happened to lose power,
your phone line would still work,
which means your system would still
work as long as it had a backup battery, of course, right?
Because if the power is out to the system,
the system still has that backup battery,
and it'll still function in sending out the phone line
signals, which then you would still
have a working alarm in the event of a power outage.
However, phone line still does have its faults, right?
So a lot of people don't realize that people can actually
just cut your phone line, and if that's
all you're using on the system, then your system
is no longer going to communicate out
because the phone line has been cut.
Now this is where cellular communicators entered in.
Cellular communicators allowed it
to where if your system was using phone line
and it got cut, the cellular communication,
the system would pick up on the cellular communicator
and continue to send signals out through the cell path.
Now in days, before we had phone line,
and then we added cellular to it, but now in days,
everyone has internet at the house now.
And again, same concept.
If you're already paying for internet,
why not allow internet communication
to be what's used to send all the alarm signals?
So a lot of these systems are now going from phone line
to cellular, now having three capabilities, right?
You can either choose from cellular, internet, or phone
line.
Again, not every panel out there has the capability
for phone line, as phone line to this day
now is starting to be pretty unreliable.
Sometimes it sends out dirty signals.
If you're using VoIP, voice over IP,
we have seen, from a lot of our customers that use it,
that there are a lot of issues sometimes when setting it up.
Usually what we'd recommend is to stay away from the phone
line monitoring if you can.
If it's make it or break it, you can certainly do phone line.
However, we recommend sticking just to IP and then,
of course, cellular as backup, as cellular can't really
be interrupted, right?
Internet or phone line can actually be cut.
That was just a quick little bit about phone line monitoring.
Again, only a certain amount of systems to this day
still allow it.
A lot of the new wireless systems
don't even have the connection for phone line anymore,
so it's just something you guys want
to keep in mind when purchasing an alarm system
and whether you guys are looking for cellular internet or phone
line monitoring.
And if you guys want to find out more,
you guys can always e-mail us at support@alarmgrid.com.
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My name was Jorge from Alarm Grid.
I'll see you guys next time.