Alarm industry-focused telecom grows

BAY CITY, Mich.—IPtelx.net, a telecom carrier focused on the alarm industry, had a successful first year after spinning-off from Dice Corporation, according to Cliff Dice, president and CEO of Dice.

“Regular telephone companies are concerned with voice calls, they're not concerned about alarm signals. We built a network in the telecom industry for alarm signals,” Dice told Security Systems News.

One factor for the spin-off was that IPtelx.net grew to support some of Dice's automation competitors. “When [IPtelx.net] started to get into telecom circuits and providing telecommunications to companies that weren't even Dice customers … it became evident that somebody else had to run it.”

Cliff Dice's son, Jordan Dice, is IPtelx.net's CEO; both are 50-50 owners of the company.

IPtelx.net added between $300,000 to $400,00 in revenue, Dice estimated. “It's got a good capacity to maybe double its revenue every year or so for the next few years,” he said.

IPtelx.net was established in late 2013, by combining Dice Corp.'s PBX business and Jordan Dice's telecom business. Dice Corp announced the spin-off Jan. 6, 2016. “Even though we technically, on paper, created the company early 2015, it wasn't completely transitioned over to be its own entity until recently,” said Cliff Dice.

Taking on alarm signal traffic that traditional telecoms have technical issues with is a main channel for IPtelx.net's growth, Cliff Dice said.

IPtelx.net can reduce the amount of time in connecting calls, Dice said, because it's digitally connected to the telecom switches. By reducing the overall time needed for calls, the service can eventually reduce the number of people needed to run a central station, according to Dice.

As a new company, IPtelx.net, “didn't have to support all of the legacy telecom infrastructure like all of these bigger providers have [such as AT&T or Verizon]. We were able to start fresh with new technology,” he said.

The company will focus on an alarm-error-reduction program in the first quarter of 2016, Dice said. A second initiative for the company is pairing alarm signals with their most compatible receivers. “We're looking at which formats decode the best on which receivers and we're building routing engines into the telecom network that rout the correct format to the correct receiver,” he said.

IPtelx.net operates its own servers in Dice's cloud center.