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SIM card & monitoring station
When buying an alarm system, you can choose a SIM card and a monitoring station subscription. Is this necessary?
Let’s start with the SIM card
Depending on which model you choose, the Hub has up to 4 communication channels. These 4 channels are:
- Ethernet
- Wi-Fi
- Sim 1
- Sim 2
So there is room to place 2 SIM cards in the Hub. This SIM card can take over the internet connection if the fixed ethernet connection no longer works.
It is up to you whether you want to use a SIM card. This depends on:
- How much security the system must provide. For maximum performance, a SIM card is recommended because intrusion notifications will continue to arrive on your smartphone. Without a SIM card, you will only receive a message on your smartphone that your Ethernet connection is down.
- How often is your Ethernet connection down at home? If your Internet is always stable, you will not need a SIM card as a backup.
- The costs of a sim card. If you look at simyo.nl or simpel.nl you can get a large data bundle for only 2 euros per month. This is cheaper than the alarm system providers. If you want to use a sim card as a backup connection, choose to buy it directly from a provider, and not from an alarm system provider. Buying from the source is cheaper. Note: The smallest data bundle is already sufficient, because the system uses 35MB per month maximum.
What is an M2M SIM card?
There are many providers who say you always need a special M2M SIM card for the Hub. M2M stands for machine to machine. This means nothing more than that you can only send data with these SIM cards and you can’t make calls with them.
These M2M simcards are always more expensive and come with a smaller data bundle than a simcard from a random provider.
Every simcard from any provider works in the Hub.
The only thing you need to pay attention to is whether the provider in question supports the network the Hub works on. The Hub 1 and Hub 2 only have a 2G connection, also known as the “old” GSM network.
The Hub 2 Plus has multiple antennas including 4G / LTE, so with this Hub 2 Plus you never have to worry that a random provider no longer sends the right signal. With the other Hubs, we advise you to choose a provider that supports the 2G network.
Monitoring station
By default, all notifications from your alarm system arrive on your own smartphone, and possibly the phones of your housemates or family. Based on the received notifications, you take action yourself, such as calling the police.
If you are not able to respond to burglary alarms yourself, and neither are your housemates or other family members, it may be interesting to pay a monthly fee for an alarm centre.
A monitoring station responds to almost every report. We say almost, because there are rules about when a monitoring station can call the police. So always make written agreements with the monitoring station if you choose this option.
Often, an alarm system representative makes the connection of the monitoring station look better than it really is in order to gain extra commission, and it turns out afterwards that the police are not called immediately when an alarm is triggered.
So always make clear agreements directly with the alarm centre so as not to find out only when it is too late. You will often see that a standard control room contract does not include a direct police follow-up. So be warned!
Is the alarm centre of interest to you?
The need for an incident room depends very much on your profession and ability to cope. As long as someone can respond to incoming calls himself, the need is less and even slower to respond. If you receive the alert on your smartphone and you see someone on the camera who doesn’t belong there, you immediately call the police yourself. That’s fast, and the police give it priority 1 status.
Know what an incident room does if your alarm goes off.
There are various rules about how an incident room should respond to an alarm. By default, the owner is always called first.
If the monitoring station does not get through to the owner, it is important to know what the monitoring station’s response will be. Do they do nothing, or do they call the police? And does it matter if only one detector detected movement, or do several detectors have to go into alarm before the control room can call the police? These are all questions that need to be answered before you enter into a long-term contract.
There are also often additional conditions linked to the monitoring station subscription in the form of a maintenance contract for your system. The monitoring station does not want to receive unnecessary notifications about system maintenance that needs to be carried out, and therefore a maintenance contract with an installer is often mandatory.
So decide if two extra subscriptions, often for three years, are worth it to be called by an alarm centre in case of a burglary.
We hope the above tips have helped you in your search for a reliable alarm system.
If you would like us to install an alarm system for you, please visit our installation page via the button below for more information.
Or check out the products in our webshop to install the system yourself.
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