Millions of People Temporarily Lose Landline Phone Service

Just last week, millions of US Comcast customers experienced issues with their landline telephone service. The outage occurred during the morning of Wednesday, June 6th. During this time, these users were unable to place or receive phone calls using their standard telephone service.

According to outage maps, the problem occurred throughout the country. The cities of San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Mountain View, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, Houston, New York, and Philadelphia were notably affected. Perhaps more troubling is that several emergency services were down, including certain police and fire departments in New Hampshire.

This is an important reminder to all regarding the risks of using POTS (plain old telephone service) with an alarm system. Not only is POTS connectivity slow, it also quite unreliable. Many signals sent out from an alarm system through a telephone line fail to go through properly. This can be incredibly dangerous during an emergency. Additionally, an intruder can potentially cut a phone line to prevent the system from working properly.

That is why we encourage all our users to sign up for cellular monitoring. Most security experts agree that cellular service is the optimal communication path for an alarm system. Cellular communication is extremely reliable, with the service almost never being down or unavailable. It is unaffected by power outages, and it is next to impossible for an intruder to tamper with the connection. Additionally, the LTE cellular speeds of today are right on par with those of WIFI connectivity.

Cellular monitoring will allow allow you to connect your system with an interactive service platform, like Total Connect and Alarm.com. These services can be accessed at any time to operate an alarm system. By accessing their service, a user can arm and disarm their system, check the current status of sensors, control Z-Wave devices, view their security cameras and more. And with the service's mobile app, these actions can be performed from virtually anywhere with your smartphone.

To get cellular monitoring, you will need a panel with a cellular communicator and an alarm monitoring plan that includes cellular service. For Alarm Grid, these are our Gold and Platinum level plans. For more information, please check out our monitoring page. If you want to get started with monitoring, please email us at support@alarmgrid.com, or call us at 818-888-7728 from 9am to 8pm M-F.