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Canadian central stations prepare for ULC redundancy requirements

With ULC’s new redundancy requirements for Canadian central stations set to come into effect in January 2025, monitoring providers have been making the necessary adjustments to their own operations in order to comply.

Introduced approximately five years ago with a 2025 deadline, the new regulations outline the requirements for redundant intrusion signal receiving centres and fire signal receiving centres necessary for compliance to CAN/ULC-S301 and CAN/ULC-S561.

In a 2022 CANASA National Monitoring Centre Symposium presentation given by Alan Cavers, who was engineering manager at ULC at the time, the redundancy requirements were outlined as: “A physical location that is able to provide all of the essential functions of a signal receiving centre, should an automated signal receiving centre become unable to process signals.”

As such, “a minimum of two signal receiving centres shall be provided in compliance with the applicable requirements of the standard.”

Dan Small, president of third-party monitoring firm Armstrongs, says “these new ULC requirements represent probably the biggest change in the monitoring industry in Canada in decades. There have been technological changes, but as far as regulations go… it’s certainly the most impactful,” he says.

“In the past, redundancy was built into the central itself in redundant receivers. This is really the first development in requiring automatic redundancy in dealing with signal traffic and also not having it housed in one location. You need two locations now,” explains Small of the new ULC requirements.

Armstrongs operates monitoring facilities in Edmonton, Dartmouth, N.S., and recently opened a new station in Laval, Que. The latest facility represents a more than $3-million investment on the part of Armstrongs’ parent organization Becklar.

Armstrongs, a wholesale monitoring company, recently opened its latest monitoring station in Laval, Que. (image courtesy Armstrongs)

B.C.-based Paladin Technologies also opened a new monitoring facility in recent months. The company now has two ULC-certified stations: one in Victoria and the newest one in Ottawa (Paladin also operates a satellite station in Vancouver).

“The intention behind [the Ottawa station] was it would provide us with the geographic redundancy to match the ULC requirements,” explains Allison Tuke, director of monitoring operations. “Doing so gave us much more stability over geographic regions and it allows us to be able to be much more resilient in our service offerings to our customers.”

Third-party monitoring provider Lanvac Surveillance currently operates ULC-certified stations in Montreal and Toronto. Lanvac’s Stephanos Georgoudes says the company strives to go above and beyond ULC standards and is already in compliance with the incoming redundancy regulations. It is, however, building a second monitoring station in Montreal with plans to have it fully operational towards the end of the year. “Our thought was, although we have the [station] in Toronto, we wanted to have another closer to home. So now we’ll have three ULC-listed central stations in total redundancy along with a few remote locations across Canada,” he says.

A positive change

Chris Currie, president of Security Response Center (SRC), says the new specifications requiring redundant sites will ultimately be a boon to the monitoring industry and have been a long time coming. SRC currently operates monitoring stations in Belleville and Sarnia, Ont.

“It’s fantastic having the redundancy requirement in place. It’s something that should have always been there,” he says.

“To put all of your eggs in one basket with one monitoring station probably wasn’t the right way to go about doing it, but that’s the way it was done for so many years until ULC started talking about the new requirements back in 2020.”

The change, however, may be a difficult pill to swallow for monitoring operations that don’t have the resources to set up a second site.

For some monitoring providers, where ULC-certified accounts only make up a small portion of their business, it might make more sense to outsource them to a monitoring provider that is already in compliance rather than undertake the upgrade investment themselves, explains Currie. He says he has seen an uptick in SRC’s third-party monitoring business as the 2025 deadline approaches.

“For other companies, they have to pick the business case that’s right for them,” he says. “We’re bringing on new dealers all the time…. They want to leverage our infrastructure, they want to leverage our software, they want to leverage our two monitoring stations that have the redundancy to satisfy the requirements of ULC.”

Cliff Dice, CEO of monitoring infrastructure provider the New DICE Corp., says he has also seen a swell of interest in his company’s services. He says DICE can provide the infrastructure that would allow Canadian monitoring stations to meet the ULC redundancy regulations if they currently don’t have the capacity to do it themselves. DICE operates facilities in Bay City and Marquette, Mich., and owns a Canadian carrier (phone company and ISP) called IPtelX, which can also offer Canadian partners private fibre for data transfer.

“If you don’t want to provide all the infrastructure — the servers, the networks, the building — and you want somebody to do some heavy lifting for you, then you can have us turn your servers up, your PBXes and give you your internet connection and all you have to do is have the PCs and the people,” he says.

He says a number of Canadian stations have looked to DICE for some or all of these services. “We’ve had quite a few and there’s more transitioning to us… I think a lot of these central stations were probably pushed to their limit for IT and technology support.”

Next-level monitoring

The ULC redundancy requirements are part of a larger wave of change that was already coming to the monitoring industry. Small from Armstrongs says the new regulations are “forcing the industry to reinvest and rethink how we’re doing things.”

The new Laval station “was designed as a highly redundant national data centre to provide a Canadian-based facility as the primary home for all our receivers and the storage of Canadian subscriber information,” he says. “Knowing we had to work on this technology and what we had in our existing stations, there had to be an investment in that. [The station] was designed with that in mind.”

Having a new station “gives you the opportunity to make sure you’ve got the best security posture — cybersecurity is obviously a real threat these days,” says Paladin’s Tuke. “It also allows us to be able to look at the receiver equipment and make sure that we are in a position to be able to diversify over GSMs and over IPs and away from the POTS traffic.

“You need the new technology in order to keep current. Certainly, doing the refresh in Ottawa has also allowed us to do a refresh of our centre in Victoria.”

More automation

Artificial intelligence has had an impact on numerous aspects of the security industry and monitoring is no different. As automation tools have become more sophisticated in recent years, central stations are embracing their potential.

Small says Armstrongs is using a new platform called Becklar Engage that uses AI and machine learning to help identify the intention of incoming calls. “It enables live operators to focus on emergency signals and respond really quickly. It effectively blends AI with human interaction to provide faster response.”

The technology does not replace the human operator but helps them become more effective, adds Small.

Tuke agrees that the level of automation happening in stations today is “significant.”

She says more than 30 per cent of signal traffic coming into Paladin stations is routed through an automated path to determine their validity and whether an operator “needs to have eyes-on to make a decision.”

Antony Strube, executive vice-president, monitoring, at Paladin Technologies made it clear, however, that crucial decisions are not left to machines. “We don’t want AI to start making decisions based on an assumption,” he says. “It’s very important to distinguish, in a response environment, that we do not rely on technology to come up with their own resolutions. It is being driven by set standards and expectations.”

Dice believes Canada has adopted AI faster than the U.S., particularly as it relates to video surveillance and video monitoring. He says AI is likely to take on a larger role in monitoring facilities as the technology grows more powerful and becomes more sophisticated.

“AI — what I call ‘digital humans’ — are taking over more and more of the workflow that a human operator has done,” he says, noting that video monitoring especially has benefited from AI analytics, leading to fewer false alarms. “That is getting better and better all the time.”

CANASA will host its next National Monitoring Station Symposium, which is held bi-annually, on Oct. 21-22 in Toronto.