Monitoring home security

[jozone]

I am also having trouble with my alarm system (Monitronics) and OOMA. Ooma has sort of washed their hands of this issue & told me to go to the forum...figure it out myself. I'm going to give it a try, but to start off with a company that handles customer issues in this manner is a little troublesome. I hope it's not a harbinger of things to come. Any advice appreciated. Am waiting on a tech call from Monitronics to see if they can help with a work-around.

[southsound]

I am also having trouble with my alarm system (Monitronics) and OOMA. Ooma has sort of washed their hands of this issue & told me to go to the forum...figure it out myself. I'm going to give it a try, but to start off with a company that handles customer issues in this manner is a little troublesome. I hope it's not a harbinger of things to come. Any advice appreciated. Am waiting on a tech call from Monitronics to see if they can help with a work-around.

I think the reason the cs people did the handoff is that the official ooma line is that ooma does not support security systems and they recommend keeping a landline for that purpose. Many of the cs people also know that there are a lot of folks who use ooma successfully with their alarm system and because of this forum, you have access to them. A couple of things that you should know about alarm systems and ooma.

First is to make sure your wiring is correct. Alarm systems take control of your phone line when an alarm is reported. This prevents an intruder from picking up a phone and disabling the report. Alarm systems connect up via an RJ31 jack - the T and R terminals go to your telco network interface box. You need to connect up your ooma's phone port to this side of the jack. The R1 and T1 terminals of the RJ31 go to your home wiring - in other words, the jacks in your walls. You cannot connect up the ooma to this side as it will make your alarm system fail. You can either wire the ooma directly to the proper terminals on the RJ31 (T and R) or you can go to your network interface box and make the connection there. Note that the jack (female) in the box goes to the telco central office. If you want to connect using a premade cable, you will need a male/male coupler and hook up to the plug on the short cable. A better way is to connect directly to the wires that are fed by this plug.

Second is to understand how the alarm system dials and connects. Your system MUST use DTMF or tone dialing. Some older panels used pulse dialing (like the old rotary phones) and will NOT work with ooma. You also need to change the number the system is dialing by adding *99 pause before it dials the reporting center. This will make your ooma use a wider bandwidth codec that will improve data transfer.

I am sure that others will chime in with even more advice, but that should get you started.