Re: Need to cut through the BS on Alarm monitoring costs

[blueman <NOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxx>]

nick markowitz <nmarkowitz@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Feb 1, 5:34Â pm, blueman <NOS...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I am looking for honest, unbiased, unemotional answers to this
>> question. (I know it's Usenet, but one can always hope...)
>>
>> I currently have a fire & burglary monitoring policy with the local
>> dominant alarm company. I own the equipment and I am responsible for
>> service charges to fix the equipment.
>>
>> They charge me $36/month for straight Internet monitoring.
>>
>> National online monitoring companies offer seemingly the same service
>> for $8.95/month. Or 1/4 the cost.
>>
>> My high-priced local company claims:
>> - They are big (20,000 customers) - but the national competitor claims
>> Â  40,000 customers
>>
>> - Their service center is "local" -- but it's really halfway across the
>> Â  state so does that really mean anything in the day of the Internet
>>
>> - They are a "security company" vs. competitors being "monitoring"
>> Â  companies. Though not sure what that means or why I care
>>
>> - They have a 5-star UL-listed center - but the national competitor
>> Â  claims to be UL-listed and it's not clear what 5-stars means and who
>> Â  even grants such certification. Sounds like marketing hype.
>>
>> - They have 30-second average response time -- but competitor claims the
>> Â  same
>>
>> - They say they have a better BBB track record than big national
>> Â  competitors - but the competitor claims an A+ BBB rating which can't
>> Â  be too bad
>>
>> The bottom line is that I can't see one compelling reason to pay 4 times
>> the competitor rate for what seems to be a commodity service.
>>
>> - I live in a very safe, low crime neighborhood.
>>
>> - I primarily pay for the monitoring to get the insurance break.
>>
>> - I don't stay up nights worrying about fires or burglaries and in any
>> Â  case I still have the in-house alarm to warn me of a fire and scare
>> Â  off amateur burgalers.
>>
>> - I am technically adept and have no problem servicing and programming
>> Â  my system
>>
>> Seems like worst case perhaps the response time will be a few seconds
>> longer in some rare cases or maybe there is a small chance they will
>> make a mistake -- but the point is that there are so many other failure
>> points in a security system and we are talking about rare events (fire,
>> burglary) anyway.
>>
>> So, why pay 4 times as much????
>
> Go to that national service and find out the hard way. What they
> promise and what they deliver is another story.
> I have seen national centers take 20 minutes to dispatch a fire
> system.
Yeah, my overpriced current company has a whole page of "scare" stories
of how people's houses burned down with ADT. I'm sure with the millions
of alarms out there times decades of history that anyone can cherry pick
a few colossal failures.

But we live in the world of statistics and risk-adjusted probabilities
not anecdoetes. The question is what is the additional risk to life and
property for going with a far cheaper service vs. the overpriced
regional monopoly. We makes such decisions all the time when we choose
what cars to drive, whether to cross a street, whether to play a contact
sport, etc. My guess is that we are talking millions of dollars of
excess premiums per potential life saved and thousands of dollars in
excess premiums per dollar of property damage averted. I can spend the
saved dollars in much better ways with significantly higher returns on
either safety or personal amusement.

Also, it's hard to believe that a UL-listed service would maintain its
certification if such extreme cases were anything but the rarest of
outliers. Plus, anything that extreme would probably be grossly
negligent opening them up to legal liability (but I will remember to
check to make sure that any company I choose is insured in case of the 1
in a billion case that my house burns down when we and our neighbors are
not around to hear the blood-curdling alarm and when the monitoring
station happens to choose that unlucky moment to take 20 minutes to
respond).

> owe did I mention the phone calls in middle of night because
> your system did not test or some other thing that could wait till
> morning  go ahead go to that other service you will gladly pay 10
> times the cost to go back to what you have.

I will also check the refund policy in such cases where the call center
operators have nothing better to do than pester us in the middle of the
night with test failures and other crank calls (by the way my current
system monitored the regional over-priced monopoly wakes us up all the
time with transmit failures in the middle of the night).

I truly must laugh at how transparently biased and agenda driven the
respondants post is. Makes me chuckle...