[LINK] NBN and personal alarm compatibility

[Paul Brooks]

On 13/08/2013 11:26 AM, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> Interesting article about the other sorts of services that hang off 
> the current phone systems.
>
> http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/government-it/alarms-may-not-work-with-nbn-20130812-hv1cl.html
>
> But if there are analog conversion ports on the termination boxes and 
> the devices that connect to the analog network now do so 
> successfully, AND we have been told our analog phones can connect to 
> one of those ports, why wouldn't this just work?
>
> BTW, I have LOTS of phone outlets in my house. Assuming that in the 
> 5-6 years still to go before NBN appears at my place (I am definitely 
> not in the first 3 years of rollout), I'm assuming that my analog 
> connection end-point would just be moved to connect to one of those 
> analog ports. Right or wrong?
Its an issue that has been known and worked on for at least the past several years,
has been the subject of several reports, and is currently the subject of a Comms
Alliance workgroup looking at cabling practices.

'Standard' houses with standard phone sockets and no special considerations can be
connected fairly readily so that the existing sockets all should continue to work.

Alarm systems - both security alarms and personal health alarms - cause two problems.
1) some of them use non-standard audio tones (NOT like modems and faxes) which
apparently have difficulty getting through the G.711 VoIP conversion
2) many alarms are connected to a 'mode 3 socket', which has to be connected in a
special place in the phone-point topology, closest to the first socket/building entry.
If the NBN box is connected to the existing in-house wring at any random socket, then
the 'mode 3' function doesn't work any more and the alarm system won't see any
dial-tone at all - so you need to be careful about how the in-house cabling is
connected to the NBN NTU
3) alarm suppliers are paranoid about non-stop power, and don't like the NBN's battery
backup, or that consumers might not keep battery backup. If the mains power fails the
alarm system usualy has a backup battery, but thats not much use if the phone socket
is dead because the NBN NTU has lost power.

If you're interested further see
http://commsalliance.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/23957/NBN-End-User-Premises-Handbook---Release-2-Jun10.pdf
for an early look at home cabling issues, that also discusses alarm systems.




Paul.