If my alarm dialler stops working how would I know?

Posted by Michael Beaver on

If you have a traditional alarm dialler/communicator that sends SMS messages and makes calls from the actual unit using a mobile phone SIM, then you won't know if it stops working until it's too late. This is one of the reasons we created the cloud dialler...

If it's our cloud server sending the messages and making the calls we tell you when your dialler goes offline.

You fit an alarm dialler to alert you to critical events that are happening when you're not there. If your dialler is responsible for telling you what is happening, how will you know when this fairly unreliable piece of equipment fails? 

There are so many reasons a traditional SIM based dialler can fail you cannot depend on it to be 100% reliable. For example it will fail and will be unable to tell you it has failed if:

  • It doesn't see enough usage
  • It doesn't get topped up
  • If your balance is low
  • The local mast fails
  • Network faults
  • The power fails
  • The unit fails
  • The signal strength drops too low

 

Using our cloud diallers with our long life, multi-network, prepaid eSIMs most of the issues described above are eradicated. If your balance drops below £2 we notify you. We tell you when it's negative and then tell you when it finally goes below £-2 and we stop sending SMS messages and making calls. At any point you can still log onto the Live Screen and check it as data is free.

However, even with our cloud diallers, it is possible that the power can fail or the aerial is knocked off or there is a total PCB failure. If this occurs we will know about it within a few minutes and can inform you via email and SMS.

Every 4 minutes our server initiates a scan of all IP addresses on our VPN that should be operational. The remote device will respond with data such as I/O status, signal strength etc... and we log the time we last heard from the device in our database. Similarly, if the remote device does not hear from our server every 4 minutes it will automatically do a power on reset. We do this scan to re-assure both the remote device and our server that everything is good with each device.

Every hour our server initiates our error-monitor script which scans through the database checking for irregularities. One of these jobs is to check the last time we heard from each remote device

Once we find a unit that hasn't been in touch with our server for over 1 hour we find the master phone numbers and 'Full Access' email addresses for it and send the warning messages notifying the owner that there is a physical problem with the unit.

Our server runs on an AWS instance which is the most reliable way of hosting any server. We have a local server monitor so if it ever fails it automatically restarts without a person doing anything. The server commentary is constantly checked throughout the day to ensure everything is running correctly.

Only using our cloud diallers can you be certain your cellular alarm dialler is fully functional all of the time. Mobile phone SIM diallers simply do not compare to these products and should not be used in critical alarm systems.