Spent $400 on a cellular communicator upgrade and it paid off in week one

I installed a Honeywell GSM module for a client in Nashville last month because their old phone line dialer kept failing. A big storm took out the phone lines two days later and the alarm still went through to the monitoring center. Has anyone else seen better reliability after dropping POTS lines?

3 comments

3 Comments

dakota4151mo ago

Hold up, $400 paid off in a week? That's a pretty bold claim. I mean, yeah, the storm taking out the phone lines right after is a lucky break, but it's also kind of a cherry-picked example. What if the storm never hits? Then you're just sitting on a $400 module that maybe does the same thing as the old phone line until the lines get cut later. I've seen plenty of cellular modules get jammed or have signal issues in basements too, especially around Nashville with all those hills. It's not like they're some magic bullet that never fails.

marywilson1mo ago

You mentioned cherry-picked examples and that's just how most success stories work, cherry on top.

robin6281mo ago

You ever had a buddy who swore by something then got burned? My friend Rick put a GSM module in his place outside Franklin. Worked fine for six months. Then a bad storm rolled through and his cell signal went to crap. His alarm didn't trip right. Monitoring center got the alert late by like 45 minutes. Turned out the tower near him went down and the backup battery on the module was almost dead. So much for that $400 upgrade.