Caerphilly County Borough Council has upgraded its telecare equipment and home units to ensure 21CN compatibility. Carried out by Tunstall, the upgrade ensures that the telecare systems used by the borough’s 157 grouped housing schemes and home service users are ready for BT’s migration to an IP-based network.
21CN is BT’s new digital network which is being rolled out across Great Britain during 2008. However, the network can affect the transmission of tone-based protocols between social alarms and monitoring centres. This can result in failures, including dropped calls, incomplete data being transmitted to the monitoring centre, or alarm activation not raising an alert, all of which pose a serious risk for telecare service users.
Val Parsons, telecare services manager, Caerphilly County Borough Council, said, “We have a legal obligation to protect our users from problems caused by equipment incompatibility with 21CN. If there is the slightest possibility of the equipment failing, then we have to do something about it.”
Caerphilly’s grouped housing schemes have been equipped with Tunstall’s Communicall Connect, an advanced, telecare-enabled communication system which provides constant communication and manages risk by linking with telecare sensors to raise an automatic alert if an incident occurs.
