RFI's Central Station Receives Key Upgrades

After months of planning and development, RFI recently opened the Control Center, a new state-of-the-art, UL-certified central station monitoring facility. This new facility features advanced tools and capabilities based on the latest developments in information technology.

RFI has a comprehensive central alarm station program to suit every security need to provide you with the comfort of knowing that all alarms generated by your system will be quickly and efficiently handled by trained professionals. In this issue of the Integrator, we’ll cover a few of the new capabilities and follow up on others in future issues.

The transition to a SQL database enables RFI to expand its reporting abilities beyond traditional static reports. Customers now have the ability to run custom rather than pre-set queries and generate truly dynamic reports. You can better analyze alarm data and activities, perform trend analyses, check peak times and improve response times. RFI also now uses an integrated platform for monitoring various systems and applications. When alarms come in, video is presented simultaneously (via dual monitors) to our central station operators to enhance their performance and your quality of service. RFI has also added a third layer of backup redundancy to ensure system operation and security.

RFI has also automated its receiver technology. When alarms come in, a tone is generated by the on-site panel. RFI’s new Surgard System III receivers automatically record the tone and determine which return “handshake” a specific panel needs to receive in order to speed up alarm responses. All alarm formats are accepted so there’s never a delay in response times.

RFI’s new facility can also receive IP-based alarm signals using our new Bosch receivers that can be used with any type of alarm panel. Accepting alarm signals over the Internet greatly expands the facility’s responsiveness and even enables virtually real-time panel supervision. In the past, if a panel was disabled or stopped working, monitoring facilities wouldn’t know about it until the next scheduled check in. But the new IP-based receivers continuously and automatically check with customer alarm panels every 75 seconds to ensure constant communication between RFI’s monitoring facility and your business.

There are many other new and exciting monitoring technologies, and we’ll discuss them in the next issue of the Integrator. In the meantime, if you have any questions about RFI’s new central station monitoring facility and the new technologies and services we provide, we invite you to contact us for more information.