Thank you for trusting Advance Alarms to service and monitor your alarm system.

It’s vitally important to us to provide you with the most secure link between your alarm system and our alarm monitoring center.

To send and receive signals to and from your system, we typically use a dedicated cellular communicator that is connected to your alarm panel.

We use them because they have proven to be reliable and fast. Reliable because they can’t be taken out by burglars or disabled due to temporary power loss, and fast because they use the same cellular networks that your smartphones use; typically AT&T or Verizon.

The downside to using their networks is that we are at their mercy when they decide to retire older technologies. In what’s come to be known as cellular sunsetting, these providers phase out certain networks in order to better serve newer and more efficient devices.

AT&T & Verizon are beginning to phase out their 3G networks starting in July. They will be discontinuing these services, tower by tower, until each network is completely shutdown by December 2022.

If you have an older system with cellular communicator, it may be affected by this sunset.  The good news is that it’s easy to upgrade. The upgrade just requires a short service call from one of our technicians.

We recommend that customers upgrade their system as soon as possible to avoid any lapses in service. The sunset is a gradual process, and there’s no way to know when your area in particular will be affected.

If you’ve received a call from our monitoring center about testing your alarm, your system may already be affected.

You may be wondering what happens if you don’t upgrade your cellular communicator…

In short, your system won’t be able to send signals to our monitoring center and will work as a local alarm only. This means our alarm dispatchers will not be able to receive and handle signals from your system, and won’t know to dispatch authorities or react to your system’s events.

As always, we are here to help. Contact us today to setup an appointment for your upgrade, or if you have any other questions about the sunset.