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Local Items: High Telephone-bills in combination with an alarm-system.
Bonaire Talk: Local Items: Archives: Archives 2007: Archives - 2007-01-01 to 2007-06-30: High Telephone-bills in combination with an alarm-system.
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By Harrie Cox (Experienced BonaireTalker - Post #448) on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - 11:40 am:     Edit PostPrint Post

High Telephone-bills in combination with an alarm-system.

If you have an alarmsystem with a connection to a monitoring-station you can be confronted with higher telephone-bills due to changes or problems Telbo made or had in their installation.

From November 13th 2006 until February 13th 2007 and probably also from June 1st 2006 until June 8th 2006 the alarmsystems had problems to connect to the monitoring-stations. Normally they connect 1 to several times a day to the station to give changes in the status of the system to the monitoring people. (One time is the 24-hr. check, if connected, the others are carried out, also when there is not an emergency, and are depending on your usage of the system. We found out that in case of an emergency the reaction-time of the alarm-follow-up also was very long, due to these problems, and we accused falsely the alarmpeople of their slow reaction. During the mentioned period(s) the alarmsystem could call to the monitoring-station, but the digital signals couldn’t be transferred, so the telephone-contact was aborted after 24 seconds, and the alarmsystem would retry to contact again, several times. When this happened, your normal telephone-line would seem dead, because the alarmsystem kept it occupied, in our situation we didn’t have telephone-connection for hours, after a change in the status of the alarmsystem. This problem occurred with different alarmsuppliers and different alarmsystems. Some alarmsystems (Ademco) gave in their display the remark “FC”, which means Failure Communication.
This means you will have paid for a lot of connections and seconds telephone-time. In our case we had up to 50 telephone-connections a day (for alarm-only) in stead of normally 2 in average, which raised my telephone-bill with some NAf. 200,-- a month.
If you have a specified telephone-bill, it will be easy to check this, because you will find lots of telephone-calls to the monitoring-station. If there is no specified bill you just can see a higher telephone-bill over the months October 2006, December 2006, January 2007, and probably also over February 2007 and perhaps also over June 2006. If you have a S.S.S.-system installed, your local calls will be higher, if you have a B.S.S.-system, your international calls will be higher, and also the local-calls can be higher, provided a “follow-me” telephone-number is activated in your alarmsystem.

I have been contacting Telbo ever since the beginning of December. In December a technical guy came to take a look, and only tried to accuse me of having too many phones connected in my house, (these are a set of 6 wireless phones, that only occupy the telephone-net as one phone). At that moment I didn’t know about the high bills yet.
Since January 19th I have been making several phone-calls to Telbo, (got the promise to be called-back, and never got an answer), and I’ve send several mails and letters, and also didn’t get any reaction, not even a mail like: we’ve got your complaint and we will answer you asap. I know this is typical for the Caribbean, and even more typical for Bonaire and even also typical for Telbo. If you pay too late, you will be disconnected immediately, but giving an answer on a serious complaint will take months (if you get an answer), not to talk about paying-back the money and costs.

This post was merely meant to give you the possibility to check your phone-bills, and if you encounter the same problem, please let me know, so we can join our forces to get the too-much-paid telephone-costs back.

Harrie

 

Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By Harrie Cox (Experienced BonaireTalker - Post #449) on Monday, February 26, 2007 - 2:20 pm:     Edit PostPrint Post

Humm, not really many reactions, aren't there any BT'ers with an alarm-system coupled to a remote security-monitoring station, or does nobody have those high telephone-bills, or doesn't anybody bother about that, or doesn't anybody know about their telephone-bills?

Just wondering if there is someone out there who has positive or negative experiences in this field, you may, if you prefer, answer to my private mail-adress (through the board, please.)

I had at least one important reaction , from Telbo. A few hours after I posted the above message, I got a mail (on my private mail-address) telling me first a lot of excuses for the late answer (I put them on the big pile with excuses I have got already in my life), and with the promise they are going to pay me all the excessive costs for my alarm-calls back with the next telephone-bill (over January 2007). Actually that bill is already due for 2 weeks, and still isn't cashed, so, who knows?

Thanks for an eventual reaction

Harrie

 


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