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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Apple’s upcoming event, new local social networks to get around Russia’s bans, spam from your own phone number, TCL’s TV sales, Germany taking down he Hydromarket, Google adding a new label to attempt to elevate original reporting, and more.
Patrick in Tyler, Texas listens on KTBB and asked: “Question about home security systems. I researched. There’s tons of them out there. Different bells and whistles and pricing. Wondered if you could recommend two or three that you like the best. I’m looking for something for security for something inside the house and also something outside for when we are on vacation that will give me a warning when motion is detected and can signal my iPhone. Also I’m kinda confused by all the plans out there. like if you have to subscribe to a special Wi-Fi plan or something like that. So if you can advise me on that, as well, I’d appreciate it.”
Patrick, theyre all more or less the same. They all offer motion sensors, door and window sensors, window break detection, etc. And people are generally satisfied with them until they need to deal with a human being.
If you want to be alerted on your phone when something happens, just about any of them will offer that via either push notification, text messages, or calls.
For example, Cove offers all of those options and someone will reach out via the panel you install at your house as well.
You shouldnt need a parallel WiFi network, but pricing is usually shady. For example, Cove goes out of its way to hide their monthly costs on their website (a blog post says theyre between $15 and $40 a month).
Frontpoint is well reviewed but its not any more transparent, theyll make you go through an assistant to see how much money they can get out of you. If you dig enough youll find that the monthly fee is around $50.
Rings alarm monitoring service is less expensive at around $20 a month, but youll find that theyre not as well reviewed as either Cove or Frontpoint and their devices are reliant on AWSs us-east-1 region, which has a tendency to have issues every now and then. You may have heard about how some Ring doorbells stopped working in 2021 when Amazon was having issues in that region.
The other big cost will be the hardware itself, but we cant really help you much there. The costs tend to be comparable across the different companies, but theyre all highly dependent on your house and what gear you need, but that will be specific to you and the costs can vary a lot depending on whether you want to cover a studio apartment or a 6 bedroom house, or whether you just want motion sensors or cameras all over the place, for example.
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