Alarm lines on ATA's

[lundah]

Anyone here successfully got alarm lines working via an ATA? I'm trying to get a Simplex panel to play nice via a Grandstream HT818 on a MiVB rel. 10.0.0.76. The calls out from the panel to the monitoring station are completing, but the alarm company tells me they're not communicating. I've played around with DTMF methods and echo cancellation settings, but not finding a combination of settings that works. Fax machines and analog phones on the same ATA are working fine.

[acejavelin]

We have tried this off and on for years on our hosted platform and now we just say no to any attempt at alarm lines on SIP lines... It always fails, even if not initially, so now we either make the customer move to an "alternate" method (usually IP and/or cellular) or traditional telco lines. We can get faxes working with 99% reliability but alarm lines are just a hassle.

[lundah]

Yeah that seems to be the consensus. Working on my POTS replacement strategy and this is one of the things I don't have a simple replacement for. We can get cellular adapters, either from the alarm vendor or from FirstNet, but then I have to find funding (public agency, I have no budget for anything of course).

[ZuluAlpha]

We're exploring this too - just watch on your fire panel lines they have to be NFPA compliant with a certain level of battery backup in case of a power failure.

[lundah]

We're exploring this too - just watch on your fire panel lines they have to be NFPA compliant with a certain level of battery backup in case of a power failure.

I was on a webinar showing the Ooma Airdial product as a POTS replacement solution, they mentioned for elevator phones there's a requirement for 8 hours of battery backup. The Airdial unit would be a good fit as it has battery backup built-in, and FirstNet also has a device designed for alarm panels https://www.firstnet.com/industry-solutions/iot/alarm-iot-solutions/starlink-fire-lte.html.

[ZuluAlpha]

I just saw an option for this from Verizon too, called POTSSolve. It's a box with 8 or 16 ATA Ports that connects to a 66 Block to swing your existing cross-connect to and had a battery backup. Each port is a dedicated line.

[crazyscout]

Aren't these just ATAs anyways? We worked with a few companies that offered POTS replacements and it was just ATAs with SIP registrations and a cellular backup, we ended up having the same amount of issues with them so we opted to go back to using Audiocodes ATAs for our elevators/alarm lines and have those working pretty well.