Alarm Monitoring Centre and Central Monitoring Station (CMS) are considered Commercial Monitoring Centre (CMC) are an essential part in today’s society.  CMC are a well-regulated industry that provides valuable services to residential and commercial building. Typically, these services come at a monthly or annual fee.  Do the services these CMC rendered worth the fees we pay?

CMC monitor switches, gas, temperature, Personal Emergency Response System (PERS), and other sensors.  Having CMC for your home will reduce your home insurance cost. CMC are fully certified in their respective country; hence, people tend to trust CMC.  Police may refuse to respond to CMC dispatchers if they’re unlicensed.

With all the benefits of having CMC, why would I still abandon CMC industry. The industry hasn’t change much since its inception and because the industry believe in the idea of – if it’s not broken why fix it.  But it is broken. This industry requires and deserve revolutionizing.  I’m not say that every aspect of CMC needs revamping but certainly home monitoring sector is long overdue.

Let’s consider the following issues:

1. After a break-in, how quickly are dispatcher able to visit your property.
2. Is the additional charge for false alarm worth your hard-working dollars?
3. Is Neighbourhood Watch more effective deterrent than CMC?
4. Directly after daytime power outage or a major disastrous event in your community, you might be surprise to see many of your neighbours outside or looking through windows to ascertain what happen. These neighbours are your potential neighbourhood dispatchers.
5. What percentage of your neighbour works from home?
6. Isn’t it more of a deterrent if an intruder/burglar/robbers/killer believes that majority of your neighbours were lawful gunowners?
7. Which is more of a deterrent, dispatchers visiting your property tens of minutes after an alarm is triggered or intruder aware of the possibility of vigilante justice?

If you’re like me who believes neighbourhood watch is a far superior deterrent than CMC, you might want to consider forming or joining a Neighbourhood Monitoring Centre (NMC) such as Shared-Notification.