Re: Building a Central Station

["Bill" <bill190nospam@xxxxxxxxx>]

First decide who your customers will be...

What equipment will they have?

Will it be existing equipment and they will be switching to your monitoring
service or will this be just for new installs?

If just new installs, what equipment?

What services will you provide?

How many customers?

What type of phone lines will be required?

Will you need a private radio tower for company business? Local private
guard service too?

Then I would suggest meeting with the phone company (a knowledgeable
engineering type), and inform them of your needs. Ask WHERE you could locate
such a business. Across the street from a phone company exchange might be a
good idea! Maybe it would be better to locate near one particular phone
company exchange. Note: Some areas do not have *any* spare phone lines. Or
may have an old cable which is prone to having problems say when it rains. I
would not want to locate a monitoring center in such an area. If you have
your choice of cities and not one particular city, then cost of living/cost
of labor might be a consideration. Also if a national 1-800 type center, a
particular city might be better than others. Note that some downtown high
rise areas of various cities have all sorts of phone/fiber optic capacity
run under certain streets.

Then is there a building in such an area you could rent or buy *and* which
you could modify to your specs.? Is there free parking for employees, etc.?
Can employees easily get to this location or it it a traffic mess at certain
times?

Then some monitoring centers look like a computer center with a raised floor
to run wiring under and have similar security and fire systems. Are you
required to have a fire suppression system? Check with the local fire
department for what is required/allowed. Insurance? U.L.? One may say one
thing, but the fire department or local regulations may say something else!

Next is air conditioning. If you have a lot of electronic equipment in one
room, it generates heat. Might want to add up the BTU's (heat generated) of
all the electronic equipment you will have to see if the existing air
conditioning will handle the load. And if not, can additional air
conditioning be added? Some rooms in buildings can't handle the heat
generated by two employees (600 to 700 BTU's per person) let alone a lot of
electronic equipment.

Then physical security. Can you modify the building for what you will need?
Probably don't want doors with key locks (key could be duplicated). So card
access to center might be best. Can the doors be modified for your
entry/exit requitements? Man trap needed?

Wiring... Is it easy to add lots of wiring as needed? Add additional wiring
easily in the future?

Then next is equipment/software to purchase. Find out what is available. You
can go to groups.google.com and find this group, then search just this group
for specific brand names. See what people have said in the past about these
things.

With this link, you can use the lower search box to search just this
group...
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.security.alarms?lnk=srg

Then here I searched in the lower search box for monitoring software and
came up with all this...
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.security.alarms/search?group=alt.security.alarms&q=monitoring+software&qt_g=1&searchnow=Search+this+group