Re: ARE YOU REALLY BEING MONITORED? READ THIS

["Joe Lucia" <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When we didn't have as much traffic, we made an automated system to
call each phone number at least once-per-hour to make sure the phone
number was answering with tones (including 800 numbers).

More customers and better equipment and a few years later...  Now we
just monitor every incoming phone number (DID) in real-time
incorporating phone switch Call Logs and Open/Close/Test activity to
verify we are getting the "expected" activity from each phone number
based on previous weeks during the same timeframe.

>From the INSIDE the receiver does monitor the lines for voltage, but
that's irrelevant when it's connected to a PBX with T1's handling the
call traffic.

In 15 years I've never heard of the Central Station calling a Customer
to test the customers system (except by calling them and telling them
to test their system).  Maybe that was just a failed experiment,
certainly possible, but not practical these days.

If you want that kind of supervsions these days the easiest way is via
Internet Communicators with 5-minute checkins.  Traffic is free and a
checkin doesn't create any traffic for the Central Station systems and
logs.  The checkin is just tracked and an alarm is generated in the C/S
if the checkin is not received from the system within a minute after
the checkin was expected.  Dedicated lines are prohibitively expensive
and undesirable to monitor.