Telecare Soapbox: Thousands of telecare users potentially at risk

Hi Fred,

You are right - there are some serious problems with our alternative telephony providers and I suspect it's all going to get worse.

The first problem is not voice over IP as such – it's shabby, or price pressured, implementation of it by some of the alternative providers. For those that don't know how it works (and I'm not pretending that I do in any detail), many telephony providers are now using internet protocol to carry phone calls from the exchange and back to their own networks. Some companies have their own equipment in the exchanges and send phone calls from their customers back to their own networks using a single internet connection, a bit like the broadband connection you might have at home. This means that the more customers they take on in any given area, the more phone calls they have to squeeze down that single connection and the more calls they can squeeze down that one connection, the lower their running costs.

So how do they squeeze more calls down it? They lose some of the call quality using a thing called "lossy compression", in a similar way that Mp3 does for music. Some of the call quality (data) is lost but it's done in a way that a human being doesn't really notice a lot of difference – if any at all. If it isn't done carefully, even though a human might not be able to hear any difference, a machine can.

This can cause havoc because signal tones (special noises) which are used to control alarm equipment, although played down the phone line correctly, get distorted and don't come out the same the other end. Imagine you were shouting Feeeeeeee down the phone. If some of your call data was getting lost through too much compression - it might sound like Veeeeeeeeee at the other end! Or, imagine if your home were the telephone exchange and you had 20 people in your home all using Skype to make calls. Do you think your broadband would be up to it? Probably not. You'd notice a degradation in call quality as Skype tries its best to turn down the quality on the individual calls. Carrying voice over internet is full of quirks anyway without intentionally pushing connections to their limits and limiting call quality.

BT have their own voice over IP network called BT21CN network, but they've done a good job and most, if not all, signal tones are carried really well by it. Lots of alarm receiving centres are having significant problems with TalkTalk at the moment who, I think, are using compression on one direction of the phone conversation - from the network to client. So when you send a signal tone to a piece of equipment in a client's home, that signal isn't understood by the equipment because it's got distorted in some way. This is extremely difficult to overcome and will pose a problem to most equipment. (Please note I have no evidence that TalkTalk's issue is compression related, but I was looking into this the other day and that's the impression I got.)

This problem can also co-exist with other problems just generally to do with poor network configuration. For example Sky's presentation of Caller-ID does not appear consistent across all telephone exchanges. By that I mean that a Sky user can make a call and their Caller-ID will sometimes be unavailable to the recipient. If the monitoring centre is relying solely on Caller-ID as a means of identifying the end-user, this could obviously be problematic, although it would be unusual (I hope) if a monitoring centre were relying on Caller-ID.

There are other funny issues on Sky too. It's worth writing to the management of these companies and I hope the TSA has already done so for its members.

I would like to be proved wrong, but my thoughts are that until co-ordinated pressure is applied to these companies - one which poses a threat to their brands (and share prices) - for example, a nice big piece in a national newspaper or two - and some coverage on Watchdog, BBC News, etc., they will have little incentive to fix the problems. Their business models are about acquiring large volumes of customers, mainly from BT, and they are interested in the low hanging fruit. There are millions of customers to go after who are not going to be affected by these problems and the ones that are can stay where they are. So lucky BT will be left with the older customers who tend to spend less on calls.

I agree completely Fred, that it is wrong that these issues are not brought more fully to the attention of people moving their phone services to these providers but actually, I am not sure the providers themselves will care so long as they are adequately disclaimed - which they are.

James Batchelor

Alertacall Ltd
www.alertacall.com