Times They Are A Changing

For the past two years I have been trying to warn people working in the security alarm field of what I saw as the future of the industry. I know my passion is for home electronics and A/V stuff, but I have been in the security business basically my whole life and there is quite a bit of overlap in the two.

Security system monitoring is a major factor in the industry, and has played a key role in the communications infrastructure we have today.  After all, it was security and fire systems that first introduced telegraph lines directly to people’s homes and businesses. This infrastructure was all put into place so that people could be notified when there was a problem with their system.

Fast forward a hundred years or so and the technology has become amazing, and security/fire systems are doing things that people never dreamed. But the one thing that remains the same is that the systems are monitored by a person sitting behind a telephone ready to communicate with the customer, or the police, or the fire department. That person has always been the middle man who gets a signal from the alarm panel and then forwards it to the correct responder.

Technology is always about closing the gap on middle men, it is all about automating simple tasks to make things easier for the user. Technology is all about staying in contact with everything everywhere all the time, and that leaves one place for a monitoring-center-middle-man-business to go – out.

I am not saying that Monitoring stations are going out of business over night, but I am seeing a bent for the end user to find a more cost effective and efficient way of monitoring their own alarm panels.  Many tech savvy individuals have already connected there systems to a PC allowing them to receive emails or text whenever an event happens at their residence without paying a monthly fee. It’s only time before the general population adopts this same philosophy.

And what brings all this to my attention again on this fine rainy morning in December is the fact that congress has just passed a bill pushing forward this concept of independently monitored alarm systems called HR3630 which will allow 911 centers to receive automated text, emails, and video feeds directly from alarms systems.  Now, granted, this may be a bad idea with consideration of all the false alarms that are redirected by monitoring centers, but it shows that this is the direction that the industry is moving. Like it or not, alarm monitoring centers as we know it are going to become irrelevant and a new business model is required for alarm companies to continue to grow.

On the up side, the consumer is going to have more options in the future for monitoring his home than ever before. And the communications gap that has existed between alarm panels and consumers for the past hundred years is quickly going to disappear.