COPS Monitoring Bulletin Newsletter #35

As the largest provider of Professional Monitoring Services in North America, we're often asked why we operate so many UL listed, hot redundant, real-time load sharing monitoring stations. "Aren't 2 locations enough" they ask? Isn't 6 central stations just overkill? Read our explanation below and then judge for yourself. In order to illustrate why we operate 6 monitoring stations, we'll first illustrate the inherent vulnerabilities in single-site and two-site monitoring. The vulnerabilities of operating just 1 or 2 central stations is precisely why we continued to add UL listed central stations to our network from 2004 to 2017. Each time we added a location to our network, we reduced our reliance on any one site and helped to ensure availability of a Human Lifeline when needed most. Today, we operate the industry's largest network of UL listedwholesalemonitoring stations in North America. Not only is our technology deployed across multiple sites, an average of 16.7% of our staffing is diversified across all 6 of our nationwide locations. When local conditions affect staffing at one location NJ S t a ff R e d u c t i o n The staffing at 5 other sites can be adjusted to compensate. FL AZ TX TN MD + + + + + The Power of 6 No other company provides its dealers and their customers this level of redundancy. With one central location, your accounts are most vulnerable. While a UL listing is an important minimum standard, it doesn't adequately address the total loss of a single location, which means an outage can leave your business and your customers completely unprotected. The vulnerabilities of operating just one site is the reason we openedour second 14 years ago in 2004. While thismarkedly improvedour disaster preparedness over a single site, we quickly realizedoperating2 sites presented another vulnerability. It's simplemath: 50%of the staff at one location cannot handle 100%of your alarm traffic in the event of a site outagewhilemaintaining acceptable response times. 100% of Technology and People are at risk during an outage. Why Not 1? Why Not 2? What's more probable? A catastrophic total loss of a central station, or some other "local event" that will affect a central station's ability to staff, and therefore, monitor your customers' alarms? While both are possible , our 40 years of experience tells us that local weather or other disaster related conditions represent the most common recurring problem. Local events such as blizzards, hurricanes, severe weather, earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, wildfires, and even riots can affect a company's ability to monitor by doing 2 simple things: 1) increasing alarm traffic, and 2) complicating the ability to staff. When these 2 things occur together, it creates the "perfect storm," for monitoring, and a company with just 1 or 2 central stations may see their response times go from seconds to minutes. When it happens to us, our already fast response times often get better. See below for the reason. NJ AZ TN TX MD FL An average of 16.7% of our staffing is distributed across our 6 nationwide locations Most Common Impact on Monitoring Why 6 UL Listed Central Stations?