Digital Dawn Lights Up Alarm Industry

Internet Reliability Reshapes Communication Avenues

 

 

Presently, 69.2 percent of the U.S. population uses the Internet. What years ago seemed to be an evolving technology has become ubiquitous in most modern homes and businesses. With an international fiber backbone and high-speed networks all over the world, the reliability of the Internet has improved drastically in recent years. New services such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) become more reliable every day. Yet trying to communicate with alarm panels and the performance of up/download programming remains a major challenge for many alarm dealers around the country.

While Internet-based communications have become more reliable, dubious people still say, “What happens if the Internet goes down?” While this could be a possibility at the “last mile of communications” to the home or business, the chance of the entire Internet going down is highly unlikely. This is due to the meshing of communications and redundancy. The Internet is so massive that if one part of it goes down, traffic is automatically routed through many alternate paths to its final destination.

There is even talk about future GSM phones using the “store and forward” features of SMS text communications in a meshing fashion. Since there are so many cell phones now using SMS, they would be able to send messages from one phone to the next through the network when towers have been damaged or destroyed from a major storm. 

 

Role of Digital Connectivity in GSM-Based Solutions

It is important for technicians to have a better comprehension of digital connectivity when connecting new GSM units that also use Internet broadband connections with other digital services. The demand for bandwidth needs to be considered and understood.

Cable systems were originally designed to deliver broadcast television signals efficiently to subscribers’ homes. To ensure that consumers could obtain cable service with the same TV sets they use to receive over-the-air broadcast TV signals, cable operators recreate a portion of the over-the-air radio frequency (RF) spectrum within a sealed coaxial cable line. Tra
ditional coaxial cable systems typically operate with 330MHz or 450MHz of capacity, whereas modern hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) systems are expanded to 750MHz or more.

To deliver data services over a cable network, one television channel (in the 50MHz-750MHz range) is typically allocated for downstream traffic to homes and another channel (in the 5MHz-42MHz band) is used to carry upstream signals. A head-end cable modem termination system (CMTS) communicates through these channels with cable modems located in subscriber homes to create a virtual local area network (LAN) connection. Most cable modems are external devices that connect to a PC through a standard 10Base-T Ethernet card or USB connection, although internal PCI modem cards are also available.

The cable modem access network operates at Layer 1 (physical) and Layer 2 (media access control/logical link control) of the Open System Interconnect (OSI) reference model. Thus, Layer 3 (network) protocols, such as IP traffic, can be seamlessly delivered over the cable modem platform to end users.

A single downstream 6MHz television channel may support up to 27Mbps of downstream data throughput from the cable head-end using 64QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) transmission technology. Speeds can be boosted to 36Mbps using 256QAM. Upstream channels may deliver 500kbps to 10Mbps from homes using 16QAM or QPSK (quadrature phase shift key) modulation techniques, depending on the amount of spectrum allocated for service. This upstream and downstream bandwidth is shared by the active data subscribers connected to a given cable network segment, typically 500 to 2,000 homes on a modern HFC network.

An individual cable modem subscriber may experience access speeds from 500kbps to 1.5Mbps or more (depending on the network architecture and traffic load) — blazing performance compared to dial-up alternatives. However, when “surfing” the Web, performance can be affected by Internet backbone congestion.

In addition to speed, cable modems offer another key benefit: constant connectivity. Because cable modems use connectionless technology, much like in an office LAN, a subscriber’s PC is always online with the network. That means there’s no need to dial-in to begin a session, so users do not have to worry about receiving busy signals. Additionally, going online does not tie up their telephone line, which is very important in an emergency reporting situation.

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) is a competing modem technology that converts existing twisted-pair telephone lines into access paths for multimedia and high-speed data communications. ADSL can transmit up to 6Mbps to a subscriber, and as much as 832kbps or more in both directions.

 

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