Toshiba Phone System

Will a Brinks Security System work with a Vonage VOIP phone system?

Anyone know the ins and outs of the it. Any help would be greatly helpful.

Public Comments

1. It may not considering that the 911 feature works different on VOIP phones. You can try to ask vontage, but as far as I know you need to have a normal landline for alarms
2. This is totally prohibited as the VOIP is not considered reliable enough, in any case most security comms are digitally transmitted direct along the landline. Most security firms will not allow the use of a dsl or isdn line in case of signal interference.
3. The quick answer, not reliably if at all. However, how 911 works has no bearing on whether it will work or not as the alarm panel does not dial 911. There are other methods of communication though. The major problem with voip is its reliance on power for the phone line to work. Modem must have power so does the VOIP router. You could do a battery back up thing it is pretty simple but if you don't know what you are doing you might just fry your VOIP router negating any savings you might see for a few months to come. The other issue is the alteration of frequency. For the same reason many VOIP systems do not work with faxes, an alarm signal may not be "understood" by the monitoring station receiver. Alarm panels transmit signals with frequency bursts which in essence are more analogue in nature than digital. The reason I bring this up is because Brinks has their monitoring station in Fort Worth Texas. More and more telephone companies are using lowest cost routing, which basically means long distance calls are transmitted over the cheapest sometimes less conjested route at that particular moment. This sometimes results in calls going over lower bandwidth connections which can alter the frequency slightly... Not enough for the average human to tell, however frequencies do get chopped and signals can get lost. OK, I guess that could have been confusing. The long and short of it is. I have a couple of customers using VOIP. some work with alarms some don't, the ones that do, sometimes fail. That is why there are other methods of back-up. The last time I tried Vonage it did not work at all, however they may have fixed it. Your best bet is to get a system that uses TCP/IP transmission to the monitoring station or a cellular back-up unit. Personally I prefer the cell back up as it does not rely on a physical line to your home. You may also wish to choose a station within your calling area as more and more long distance calls are getting routed over IP. Yes the regular POTS lines are going digital after the switch, which means they are getting routed over IP just like VOIP. If this is abit confusing feel free to contact me by Email and I can explain it abit better. I need to re-work this answer and stick it up on my website. Great question