Brummies tackle burglars with wireless alarms

A Birmingham community project is using GSM technology in one of the city's crime hot-spots to try and reduce the number of house burglaries.

The run-down area of Aston, which sits in the shadow of the historic Villa Park home of its Premiership football club, currently has a much higher burglary rate than the city average.

But the £54m Aston Pride community regeneration project has teamed up with BT and local police to equip 500 homes in the area with wireless burglary systems.

The BT Safehome system uses GSM to connect movement and door sensors and personal panic buttons to a 24-hour manned call centre. When a sensor is triggered, the call centre notifies the relevant emergency services or contacts a neighbour or warden.

Each home has a wireless control panel to programme a 30-zone security system. It receives signals from window, door and pet-immune movement sensors and remote key fobs via 869MHz radio and communicates with the call centre via GSM radio.

A spokeswoman for Birmingham City Council told silicon.com that almost 200 house break-ins were reported in Aston last year and that the five-year project, which has just started equipping homes with the system, aims to bring this down to the average for the city as a whole.

Robin Duke-Woolley, director at e-principles, said the system addresses the major weakness of existing alarm and telephone systems, which allow wires to be cut from outside by burglars.

"There's a lot of flexibility in moving the different bits of it about and there's lots of devices you can add to them, like cameras," he said. "So it’s a sign of the increasing flexibility of burglar alarms and a greater use of wireless - a step in the right direction."

Danny McLaughlin, managing director of BT major business, said in a statement: "It's an ideal use of wireless technology... Our initial trials have proved very successful, particularly in providing peace of mind to residents, and we expect to install units in many more locations in the coming year."