Are you looking for an alarm system to protect your home or small business? Today I’ll
be talking with security expert Peter Rogers about three questions you should ask every
alarm company.
Peter, if I’m in the market for a new security system I’m sure there are lots of questions
I should be asking. Can you share what some of those questions should be? Sure. Well there’s
a good list of those questions Kevin and at the very top is, “Does your system include
a cellular radio?” Cellular radio, now why is cellular important? That sounds like my
cell phone. What does that have to do with security? It’s actually related to that.
At FrontPoint and there are some other companies that do this some of the time, but we do it
all of the time. We build a cellular radio into every system that we sell. That means
that there’s no phone line required and no phone line to be cut by an intruder.
And you might be interested to hear that there are about 700,000 phone lines going away every
month at this point. People are just canceling them left and right. Changing over to other
carriers or going to cell only. So you don’t want to have to be stuck with having a regular
phone line just for your alarm system.
Oh okay, great. So that’s a good first question to ask now, one thing I know in my own life
is I’m very very busy. Is there anything as it relates to convenience that we should
ask a security company?
Well the alarm world has changed in that regard and increasingly we’re seeing interactive
features coming along, something we happen to specialize in. By interactive features
I mean the ability to arm and disarm your system remotely, to be notified by your system
anytime something is happening, and even to have video features. Where by you could look
in on your home or receive a video clip that’s activated by a motion sensor. These are the
sort of things we really love and the people increasingly appreciate.
So if I go to work and I forget to turn on my system I don’t have to go all the way
home to turn it on, I can do that from work? And from a handheld device. There are even
Blackberry and iPhone apps that allow you to have that sort of control and for instance
on my BlackBerry I get an email to every time a door opens in my house so I can see who
is coming and going, and it helps me to keep track of the dog walker.
Okay, so is it cellular? Does it have interactive features? Another piece that’s true to my
heart is, how do I get this set up? Do I have to have somebody come visit my house or how
does that work? It used to be and now the alarm world also has gone plug and play and
as we like to say, who thought ten or fifteen years ago that you would be actually setting
up not just your computer, but even a DSL router in your home; probably not too many
people. No, no way.
Right, so one of the things we’ve done as part of our business model is develop a pure
plug and play model. Whereby we send the equipment to you fully programmed, you set it up, call
us and we remotely clock into it and make sure that everything is working properly,
and then you’re off and running.
So, no need for a sales person to come to your home, no need for an installer, no need
for a service technician down the road. Everything is completely wireless and it also means if
you ever move, you can take the entire system with you. Wow, okay so I don’t need to have
any technical expertise in order to do this. I can do it all myself and you’ll provide
help all the way. Absolutely, there’s printed documentation. We have online support. We
have phone support and we regularly hear from our customers about just how easy this was.
Great! Well thanks Peter, and thanks for joining us today on security 101. If you would like
to learn more about security just go to FrontPointSecurity.com/learn.
