Cops and robbers

An Austin, Texas, home security company may have the key that unlocks the home security treasure chest for cable television providers.

@Security Broadband is partnering with Cox Communications' Las Vegas cable system Franchise on a home security trial using cable's high-bandwidth network. If it works — and it's a long way from deployment — it could open a new incremental stream that has eluded cable for years.

Harrison Bass, @Security's senior vice president of operations, knows about cable's multiple home security efforts. He was part of a 1985 cable system trial that partnered with Dow Jones on an interactive security offering in Princeton, N.J. That rudimentary system, he said, offered one-way data transmission and delivered traditional contact sensor technology over the cable infrastructure.

“This [Las Vegas test] is a far cry from that, for sure,” Bass said.

For one thing, @Security's system runs over high-speed Ethernet. For another, the typical subscriber configuration includes a video transmission unit and four cameras associated with a handful of motion detectors and up to six contact points on windows and doors. The information is streamed across the local hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) network to a cable modem termination system (CMTS) that then streams the audio and video over a managed network to @Security's monitoring center in Orlando.

“This is a proof-of-concept technology trial more than anything else,” Bass said.

If it pans out, there will be next generation product trials in June and product deployments later this year.

So far it's been good, said Jeff Brown, Cox Communications' business development director.

“It's something that wasn't possible under our old system, but with our new plant and the hybrid fiber/coax, this is a natural extension of our products because of what you can do with this video and audio imagery,” he said.

Cox sees this as a natural extension of its voice, video and data offerings, Brown said.

The service, which consumes 128 kb/s of data space for each of the 100 Las Vegas test users, “is obviously a better mousetrap,” Bass said. Subscribers use a Web site to access their home security and periodically can turn on the video cameras to check out the home scene. @Security's operators can't do that unless there is a triggering event, Bass added.

“People… like the idea of being able to tune in and see what is going on in their home any time of day,” he said.

Cable operators like grabbing an estimated $30 to $35 a month in incremental revenue.

And cops like it because it eliminates the need to check out false alarms and gives them a greater feeling of security.

“If our technology proves out, the municipality will be dispatching [police] into a safer environment because we're going to be able to give the dispatch group real-time information,” Bass said. “We'll be able to tell them there's not one, but two bad guys here, and we can see them, and they're in the back bedroom.”

It's enough for even a jaded cable operator to look for a piece of the action. “We look at it as more than a co-location transport. Our vision is it would be much more than that,” Brown said.

@Security's vision would be to take home security to the next level. “We think we have a chance to provide a product at a time that makes sense,” Bass said. “There are a lot of us around the business who have seen security come and go, but this is a different animal.”