Alert Pal Alarm Camera anyone?

[Roger Mills]

Recently received an email from LocksOnline (from whom I've bought mechanical bits and pieces in the past) attempting to sell me a security system. Details here:

idea seems to be that when (if) it detects an intruder or a fire in your home, it sends you and SMS message - together with photos of whatever its camera can see - prompting you to contact the police or fire brigade from wherever you happen to be.

Anyone come across this sort of system? Would it actually work?

I ask partly because a thread started by Bill Wright in another NG seemed to suggest that SMS message may sometimes not be delivered for several hours. If that were the case, your house may well have been cleared or razed to the ground by the time you knew about it.

[Jethro_uk]

SMS, like email, is inherently unreliable. It's not guaranteed to work, and in instances where it doesn't the originator may not be aware of it's failure.

If you want reliability, you need to add another layer of protocol on top, to deal with acknowledgements and the like.

In a previous role, I added a feature to our emergency logging system, to generate an SMS to the assigned engineer. I made it crystal clear at the time this was simply an addition to help the engineer by having the postcode on his phone, rather than having to call into the office for his next call. Of course within 5 seconds they ignored that, and started bitching when SMSs weren't received. Unfortunately for the helpdesk staff, the front page of the training manual I prepared had in block capitals a disclaimer that the SMS feature was not reliable, and they should tell the engineers as much.

You can get secure messaging services. Another employer I worked for used "Cognito" which allowed for delivery and read receipts. It was integrated into the ticketing system, so we could work out how efficient the engineers were - they hated it as we could tell exactly when they opened a message. I think it was overlaid on the GSM network.

[Dave Liquorice]

Yep had many occasions of SMS messages taking hours to arrive. Daughter gets quite cross when her messages to arrive on my phone several hours after she sent them.

You can turn on the delivery reciept thingy but that doesn't mean the recipient has actually noticed the message let alone read it. I don't have my phone glued to my body, so if a message arrives and I'm not in ear shot it can be quite a while before I notice. Sometimes prompted by daughter "haven't you got my message?"...

[Brian Gaff]

Well that is my first thought as well. I don't do text messages myself, but I noted the other day that I'm still waiting for a second message someone sent me ten mins after the forst, its been three days now. In any case, how can these companies be selling x number of free texts if its all clogged up and unreliable. I'd have thought this kind of thing should be done over something like https in any case for security. Brian

[Jethro_uk]

IIRC SMS delivery reports are like email delivery/read receipts. An optional extension to the standard which not all servers are guaranteed to honour. And it only takes one server in the hop to not honour it, and it gets lost.

This is why I appreciate organisations (like my local council) that email you a receipt when they receive an email - at least you know they've got it. By the same token, I am always a little wary of organisations which don't acknowledge emails (whether direct, or by their irritating "webform" (which must be designed to deter complainants) as all to often you never hear anything from them, and further contact results in "we never got an email" ......).

[Peter Parry]

There have been at least two previous incarnations of this idea, and both companies making them have failed. I had one on trial for some time. It worked well enough but as others have said SMS delivery wasn't always quick (although to be fair it usually was, but don't get broken into at midnight on DEC 31st). Using a PAYG SIM also made it difficult to know how much (if any) credit you had left on the card so you could be left with nothing when you needed it (especially as some PAYG SIM's time out after a fixed period).

[Simon Cee]

part here for £82. I've used the suppliers before and apart from a minor customs gltch it all went very smoothly and arrived in five days. Can't comment on the cam exactly, but text messages round here seem to arrive reliably and promptly. A relative used a similar system (but no photographs) to text him when an intruder alarm was triggered at a house he was renovating nearby. It has worked reliably AFAIK.

Remote Security Camera (Quad-band, Motion Detection, Nightvision): Keep an eye on your home or office from anywhere in the world by receiving MMS messages when this ingenious surveillance device detects an intruder.

[alan]

If you are on the O2 network then it would not be unusual for messages to be delayed from 2 to 24 hours.

[Jules Richardson]

No. It's an utterly useless idea, because I don't have a mobile phone :-)

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 15:23:52 on Mon, 17 Dec 2012, Roger Mills remarked:

I think a chum who lives near me has one. But he was struggling because he didn't have mobile coverage in his premises (for the network it was supplied with).

As for delays in SMS delivery - I agree! When it became known about 10 years ago that some emergency services were considering dispatching vehicles with SMS, the response was: "no, just NO".

[Graham.]

COGNETO! I had one of those in a previous life and I've been wracking my brain for years trying to remember what it was called.

I think we had them before we got Band III radios installed in our cars.

[Jethro_uk]

Ah, the dangers of hearing a word, and never seeing it written down ;)

[polygonum]

>> The idea seems to be that when (if) it detects an intruder or a fire in

Seems London Fire Brigade is considering twitter to report fires...

that any more reliable than SMS?

I do appreciate the issues about gathering extra information mentioned in story. But the inherent one-wayness strikes me as a problem - and the inherent interaction is most often a significant advantage of an ordinary phone call.

[John Williamson]

The longest delay I've had on an SMS was 14 *days*. Yes, the phone was turned on and usable during the whole period, and there had been no network problems reported by either operator.

Usually, though, it's a few seconds.

[Jethro_uk]

The point is an SMS can just be lost - the protocol doesn't provide a return path for acknowledgement. Same as email.

"Usually" isn't good enough when it's real time and/or high risk.

[John Williamson]

Vodafone do provide a delivery notification, though I'm not sure if that's actually to the recipient or just their network. It certainly doesn't tell you when the message has been opened.

I wasn't suggesting that it is. I've had quite a few occasions when the client has asked me why I didn't arrive at the new time they texted me. Either the text hadn't arrived within a few minutes or I'd not heard the alert....

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 11:23:01 on Tue, 18 Dec 2012, polygonum remarked:

You can see if a tweet has been posted, and unless there's a system-wide outage (which does happen very occasionally) it's reliably almost instantaneous.

I can tell this because I have three Twitter accounts linked to my Tweetdeck and one follows the other two, so I can see the messages coming straight back.

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 11:43:38 on Tue, 18 Dec

2012, Jethro_uk remarked:

Depends what you are using to send email (and what the person receiving it is using).

I sometimes send emails "direct" to the recipient's local email server, rather than via a third party mail relay, and this means I can inherently tell if it's been received by that local server.

Also sat by my desk is such a local email server (independent of any ISP relays) which collects emails sent to one of my many domains. The contents are on my screen immediately.

[usenet2012]

In message , Roger Mills writes

I immediately thought this would be great for fitting inside my allotment shed. But the battery life is stated as 10-12 hours so no good. Anyone know of a setup which would last longer?

[Mathew Newton]

You still cannot reliably determine that the message has reached the recipient's mailbox, or that it has been opened/read.