Central station (alarm monitoring center)
Central-Station is a common term used to refer to a company that provides
services to monitor burglar, fire and residential alarm systems. The
central-station may also provide watchman and supervisory services.
Central-stations use special telephone lines, computers,
software and trained staff to monitor their customer's security
systems and call the appropriate authorities in the event an alarm
signal is received. Typically, there is a fee for services rendered.
Because quality and experience can vary greatly among alarm
companies, a prospective customer is well advised do their own
research before making a final choice. Not all alarm companies
monitor the systems they install and may outsource these services to
another company.
Some facilities are certified by independent agencies. In
the USA Underwriters Laboratories (UL) is a leader in inspection and
certification of central-stations. UL Standards 827 and 1981 must be
adhered to in order to maintain a UL issued Central-Station license.
UL conducts annual audits of these licensed facilities to ensure
compliance.
In the UK a similar structure of auditing takes place,
with NACOSS provision of inspection and certification. Numerous
standards such as BS5979 must be adhered to in order for a Central
station to be allowed to pass alerts to the police force. Emerging
European standards are superseding these at this time.
"Licensed" companies typically offer higher levels of
service and reliability because they are mandated to follow certain
regulations.
In Australia Central Stations are graded on 2 areas
operational and physical performance. Operational performance
includes the ability of the monitoring system to respond to events -
generated by customer's security systems, operational reliability,
data retrieval etc. Physical performance includes measures such as
the construction of monitoring rooms - most high security rooms have
airlocks which can only be operated internally. The highest standard
is 1a to 3c. To be graded at 3c central stations still meet very
high standards.
Central Station software has to meet very special
requirements processing and storing very large amounts of data and
integration with many different alarm protocols.
Incoming signals are processed by digital alarm receivers
these convert the incoming event packets to serial or tcp packets
which are then analyzed by the Central Station software. Event
packets can be communicated over any transmission medium PSTN, GSM,
Radio, direct line, Ethernet, GRPS, etc.