Australian Standards for Open/Close Reporting
Greetings!
In a commercial alarm situation, is Open/Close reporting mandatory as per any Australian Standard? The reason I ask this is my organisation’s security monitoring/patrols company has insisted we have this enabled on our alarm panels “so they can know if someone is onsite”. I personally don’t see the point in wasting phone calls on this as staff are told to call security ASAP if they set it off by mistake anyway. And we aren’t what I’d call a high-risk/cash business etc.
Which brings me to my second question: Is it normal for a DAS NX/48 panel to dial out multiple times in a row to report the open/close of each partition? I would’ve thought it would just make a single call out to report all area/partition changes at that time. But after looking at the absolutely gigantic phone bill it would appear a call is made for every partition state change? (Or will it only do a single call if you press the arm/'disarm all' buttons – rather arming/dearming each zone separately via the * zone-number buttons on the keypad?)
Sample Phone bill:
Whilst I'm not the one who programs this system (done by outsourced security company), I do have the installer access & programming software for the panel and some idea about how alarms are programmed (although IT is my day job) so I can take a peak at any config if required20-Apr-13 2:24 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
20-Apr-13 2:25 PM Security 0:00:11 0.31
20-Apr-13 2:27 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
20-Apr-13 2:29 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
20-Apr-13 2:30 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
20-Apr-13 2:32 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
20-Apr-13 5:42 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
20-Apr-13 5:48 PM Security 0:00:13 0.32
20-Apr-13 5:50 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
20-Apr-13 5:52 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
20-Apr-13 5:53 PM Security 0:00:12 0.31
20-Apr-13 5:55 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
20-Apr-13 5:57 PM Security 0:00:12 0.31
21-Apr-13 3:02 AM Security 0:00:11 0.31
21-Apr-13 3:04 AM Security 0:00:11 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:06 AM Security 0:00:11 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:07 AM Security 0:00:11 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:09 AM Security 0:00:11 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:10 AM Security 0:00:12 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:26 AM Security 0:00:04 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:30 AM Security 0:00:11 0.31
21-Apr-13 3:32 AM Security 0:00:12 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:34 AM Security 0:00:12 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:35 AM Security 0:00:11 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:37 AM Security 0:00:12 0.32
21-Apr-13 3:39 AM Security 0:00:11 0.31
21-Apr-13 7:00 AM Security 0:00:12 0.32
21-Apr-13 7:02 AM Security 0:00:12 0.32
21-Apr-13 7:03 AM Security 0:00:12 0.31
21-Apr-13 7:05 AM Security 0:00:11 0.32
21-Apr-13 7:07 AM Security 0:00:11 0.32
21-Apr-13 7:08 AM Security 0:00:11 0.32
21-Apr-13 12:11 PM Security 0:00:11 0.32
21-Apr-13 12:12 PM Security 0:00:13 0.32
21-Apr-13 12:14 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
21-Apr-13 12:16 PM Security 0:00:13 0.32
21-Apr-13 12:17 PM Security 0:00:12 0.32
21-Apr-13 12:19 PM Security 0:00:12 0.31
Any advice on this will greatly be appreciated!
Last edited by Earthling; 14-05-13 at 08:15 PM.
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Change your Security/Monitoring company if they wont disable or minimise the calls. Or change to a GPRS communication device which are pretty cheap now. Your weekly monitoring costs might be a bit more but you wont have any more nasty phone rebate charges which make it a more economical choice.
You could get Auto Arm programmed so that all areas auto arm at a certain time so you have a reasonable expectation the alarm is armed, if your insurance provider demanded O/C reports you could have first to open/last to close programmed so you only get one disarming eveeryday when the first area is disarmed and one arming a day when the last area is armed, If individual areas are programmed for Open/close and there is any delay in other areas being disarmed or armed the panel will make more calls for additional areas
It should only make one phone call if all the partitions are armed at the same time. My R128 is sending two test calls each week at the same time to the primary reciever and this is my own alarm at home, all the others I have put in around the dame area are fine. Must be a random NX thing.
Don't worry - you're not alone. You are just another victim of the Security Industry telephone rebate scam. The more calls your alarm panel makes, the more money your alarm company makes. Simple, but effective. They've been getting away with it for decades and they will continue to get away with it.
If you switch to GPRS, the scam goes under a different name called a polling plan. Different technology, different scam, same result - you get screwed.
The good news is that there is a way around it, if you dig deep enough.
Open and close reports are useful as they prevent any argument with insurers trying to argue that your system wasn't armed and getting you to prove otherwise.
Having said that:
Correct. They waste phone calls and the 'dollar a day' actually costs much more, not to mention the phoneline expenses for a system which can essentially be defeated by a pair of scissors.Originally Posted by IPAlarms
I don't believe they will 'get away with it' forever though. Rebates are nearing their departure given competition within the telco space. Some phone providers e.g. TPG also block calls to 1345 numbers.
Arrant nonsense. IPAlarms has his own barrow to push which is divorced from some practical realities of wired-only monitoring via Australian Internet.If you switch to GPRS, the scam goes under a different name called a polling plan. Different technology, different scam, same result - you get screwed.
The Australian Standards are not relevant here. Your insurer may or may not have a requirement and any monitoring centre should give you an option either way. However IP monitoring platforms tend to be 'all you can eat' for most scenarios and we would routinely enable open/close reporting even on small residential systems for which we'd NEVER suggest it on a dialler platform given the call expenses.
P.S. If your system is sending daily test signals AS WELL AS open and close signals, you can be pretty confident that whoever installed is taking advantage of you.
alvinclarke (15-05-13)
Can you explain the scam of a polling plan, lets just say it is a dual sim GPRS. besides being a higher rate, how is it a scam? When I last checked I did not get any rebates for the amount of polls my alarms send. The only rebates I get are from diallers. And when these are installed I do ask if my client would like a GPRS unit to save on call costs.
I am still confused how GPRS is a scam.....
Hi Earthling,
Should your alarm system not send open and close events and the last person who leaves for the night thinks that they turned the alarm on but didnt through error leaving your business unprotected and you are broken into overnight and as the system is not armed it cannot send through the alarm events, how does this affect your business.
If monitoring does not receive open / close events they cant tell you that the system is not armed.
Secondly why are there so many partitions to the system when it appears on you bill you turn it all on and off at the same time. If you leave 1 area in place only and your alarm send 1 open, 1 close and 1 test per day @ 35c per call this is costing you $1.05 for phone calls.
I have quite a few residentials that utilise split reporting , receiving o/c reports to their mobile to keep tabs on the kids getting home from school ok.
As for 1345 calls , it's money for jam for the telcos. So much so that years ago they used to be at a discounted tarrif. Now that the rates have been standardised I'd rather share in the extra profit than give it all to Telstra. It is the main reason monitoring rates haven't increased in 20 years. How can that be bad. Yes it can be abused but that can be fixed by setting out an enforceable framework.
Thanks for the replies guys!
The reporting was only enabled earlier this year at the insistence of the security monitoring company with them saying something to the affect of that it's an "Australian Standard". Now it's been discovered that this panel has been doing ~$300/month in calls.
The system has 8 partitions due to their being multiple buildings/wings/etc and 60 odd staff with access and is master-keyed/partitioned accordingly.
As for the insurance; the panel itself still has an eventlog; and I see no issue with it auto-arming every night at 10am etc.
So how does this rebate work? Do the 1345 numbers charge/credit back to the destination like a 1900 number would?
So for every phone call your system makes to the 1345 number costing you 50c or whatever it does, the owner of the 1345 number (either the installer or monitoring centre) receives a portion of that money back as a rebate in the form of a cheque once a month (in some cases this amounts to thousands a month).
You are best off installing a polled GPRS communication system for around $60-100 per month (dependent on the provider) for the monitoring and having a fulltime connection to the monitoring centre, no more phone bill for you and no more rebate for the line owner!
The installation cost of the GPRS system will be negligible once the lack of a $300 per month phone bill has been taken into account
EDIT: to keep downunderdan happy, you should choose a communication system that offers multiple methods of communication; IP, GPRS and dialer back up - always have dialer as a back-up and not the primary form of communication
Last edited by TheAlarmGuy; 15-05-13 at 12:18 PM.
Sounds like a bit of bull going on here. A 1345 call is charged at 30c. For a bill of $300/month your system would have to be making 1000 calls /month. That would be 333 calls /day or 41 calls/day/partition. Either you have a problem that needs addressing or the truth is being stretched.
Now assuming your system was set up for first to open / last to close you would be making 2 calls /day costing 60c. ( $1.80/month )
Do the sums. Go and price a GPRS + installation + monitoring and work out how long it will take to pay for itself. It will be history & you'll be paying for a new one long before you've reached break even point.
But aside from any insurance factor - do we even need to be reporting opens & close to the monitoring centre to begin with?
I have had a quick flick through AS2201 and I can't see anything saying so?
The Open / Close events allow the monitoring station to be able to notify you in the event that the alarm system is not armed, see my post above.
While there is no rule to say it must happen you really need to be aware of the pitfalls of not having it in place.
There is more to back to base monitoring than a 3am phone call to say the alarm has gone off
You used to be able to buy 'off the shelf' GRPS SIM's for around $5 with 1 or 2mB of data allowance per month. That roughly equates to 1 poll/heartbeat every 7 minutes leaving plenty of data for alarm signals. Believe me, somewhere between $5 and the $50+ that some consumers are being charged, there is a little security industry scam going on. Look at the difference between the Daily Poll Plan and the higher rate plans and you will see that someone is making money for nothing. The Australian Standards stipulate the required polling rates which in turn gives the solutions providers a license to charge what they like...... and we all know what they like.
Whichever way they turn, Aussie consumers get ripped off at the hands of the Security Industry. Always have, always will.
Why not go to and change that to just $4.95 a month?
No, to keep me happy you'd want to use us as your monitoring provider. Except I don't need to post links here unlike some people.
Huh? You may be able to give away a five buck service for your end of the equation. Unfortunately I can't do that, as I have to spend money on permanent staffing, training, IT systems, power generation, fibre services, microwave services, HVAC and a very, very busy coffee machine. People do see a difference between a five dollar product from a website of no apparent address and a world-class monitoring centre. But, each to their own...
Also, I wouldn't actually advocate dialler as a backup. I'd say get rid of it and stop spending $30-40 a month on line rental for a PSTN line which can be defeated by a pair of scissors. What I would have said is use one that's got redundancy such as SIM/Ethernet or SIM/SIM. I think that's enough and once people get to SIM/SIM/ETHERNET/PSTN etc. it's just getting a bit OTT... I'd say that's a throwback to the Securitel replacement period where the various vendors were all selling products that were fundamentally the same thing, so each tried to beat its chest... 'ours has 4 paths'...'well ours has 17 paths'....'well ours has 243 paths and polls every 2 nanoseconds' etc.
Last edited by downunderdan; 15-05-13 at 05:45 PM.
If you look back through my posts, you'll see that I don't normally post links either. I made an exception in this case as somebody is being seriously ripped off.
I'm not Australian and therefore not worthy of a .com.au domain name. My $5 product allows victims of the various security industry scams to make their own decision as to which monitoring centres are world class and which one's only appear to be.
It's no bull from the phone bill end unfortunately...our corporate Telstra reporting tool shows the full usage breakdown of its dedicated line.
Last month it made a total of 944 calls to the 1345 security number, each at a cost of 31/32c each for a grand total of $300.29
As I said in my original post, it looks like it's making a separate phone call for each partition arm/dearm - rather than communicating them all in one transmission.
I'm wondering if a user arms/dearms by entering their code then pressing *1 *2 *3 *4 *5 *6 *7 *8 to toggle each partition manually - rather then pressing the arm/dearm buttons on the top/right of the keypad - separate calls are being generated that way??? But I also vaguely thought the securetel protocol could allow multiple packets of data within the same call too? Or is the panel too dumb for this/programmed incorrectly? If anyone can clarify this that would be great!
The system should send the areas in the 1 transmission.
Maybe there is a telco fault also, if the system is trying to dial through and it does not receive a kiss off then it will try another 6 times. 6 times x 8 areas per use including the dialler test will add up pretty quick.
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