Bridging the protocol fragmentation in the alarm industry

A highly fragmented industry

The digital society is being developed around us and cloud technology in particular have disrupted many industries. New smart technologies are constantly emerging, and innovative solutions see the day of light. Trends like microservices and APIs are leading to monolithic solutions being decoupled and replaced by best-of-breed-solutions with components from an ecosystem of suppliers.

The change in the alarm and security industry, however, is slow despite the rise of IoT and cloud solutions. Said industry has been dominated by solutions developed before the raise of Internet, with monolithic design where alarm equipment and monitoring centres are tightly integrated and using analogue proprietary protocols for the alarm communication. Such solutions will not meet the change in customer demands and expectations over time. Yet, while digitalization drives new demand, modern solutions need to co-exist with legacy solutions. With old communications networks being shut down, there is urgent need to find efficient ways to maintain existing systems during the migration phase.

An essential challenge across industry sectors is interoperability of technology from different suppliers, with varying degrees of standardization. The market for alarm devices is highly fragmented with different suppliers and standards, making it hard for new players to enter due to complexity. Even with new IP based standard protocols for alarm communication in place, different suppliers can implement the standards differently, making integrations between monitoring centres and alarm equipment even more complex. There is a clear need for solutions that can bridge this gap of protocol fragmentation through an agnostic approach.

Moving towards digital connectivity

Over the last decade, most network operators in Europe have started the migration from analogue to digital telephone networks and a number of European countries have set out targets to achieve copper switch-off and full migration to internet protocol (IP) technology. The analogue telephone service in UK for example, is announced to be switched off by 2025 as UK’s telecommunication infrastructure is upgraded to digital connectivity.

Services involving analogue alarms operating over traditional telephone lines, will be largely affected by the copper switch-off. Immediate actions are needed to avoid a major disruption to current alarm services and failing to act in time may put a great number of vulnerable people at risk. Only in the UK, there are today more than 1.5 million Telecare devices connected via PSTN to alarm monitoring centres and around 3 million intruder alarms using analogue connections, which gives an idea of the magnitude of the challenge. The alarm industry must not wait until problems occur before taking steps to address the issue with analogue alarms being decommissioned.

Solution Providers within sectors such as Technology Enabled Care, Security and Facilities, must ensure that installed systems will continue to operate during and after the migration to digital networks and IP based solutions.

Benefits and challenges going digital

There are many benefits going digital. Some important aspects are: