A modern alarm system such as Ajax sends a notification straight to your smartphone as soon as a detector is triggered. That is enough for many home uses. But it assumes that someone sees the notification, understands the situation and reacts — at night, in a meeting or on holiday, that isn't guaranteed. Connecting the alarm to a monitoring centre (the “dispatching”) changes the equation: the signal goes to an operations room monitored 24/7 by trained operators, even when nobody is looking at their phone.
How the signal reaches the centre
The alarm control panel sends the event to the monitoring centre via the Internet, with a GSM SIM card as backup — both channels work in parallel, so that a router or network outage doesn't leave the installation silent. The message follows a standardised protocol (the most common being Contact ID) that tells the centre not only that an alarm has gone off, but also what type of signal it is: intrusion, tampering with the housing, technical alarm or mains power failure.
Alarm verification, a mandatory step
In Belgium, a monitoring centre may not alert the police directly on the strength of an electronic signal alone: verification is mandatory before any police alert. An operator examines the verification images sent by the detectors (such as Ajax MotionCam) and confirms whether it is a genuine intrusion before contacting the police, fire brigade or an ambulance directly, depending on the nature of the signal. This step is explained in our article Declaring your alarm system in Belgium.
What a verified alarm changes
An unverified alarm is dealt with at the bottom of the pile by the emergency services, if it is dealt with at all. An alarm verified by an operator triggers a priority response — and above all, it no longer depends on your ability to see a notification in a meeting, on a plane or on holiday.
The next link: physical response
The monitoring centre verifies the alarm and alerts the relevant emergency services. For shops and business premises that also want a guard to go on site, the additional option goes further: response after an alarm, provided by Belgium Security Brussels, a security company approved by the FPS Home Affairs that also installs SecuriShop systems.
When connection really makes sense
- Shops and businesses: premises that are empty at night and at weekends cannot rely on the vigilance of an occupant.
- Sites with technical alarms: power cuts, temperature (cold room), fire detection — signals you would rather have handled even in the middle of the night.
- Irregularly occupied homes: second homes, short-term rentals.
For a permanently occupied home, direct smartphone notifications are enough in most cases, provided a member of the household is able to respond. On SecuriShop, the dispatching option can be added directly from the Dispatching and emergency call-out product page, and requires detectors with photo verification as well as an M2M SIM card as a backup channel.