As an alarm dealer and central station monitoring provider, you've got lots to think about already. As if customer retention, finding new prospects, maintaining your RMRs, assessing the new product lines and staying up-to-date on what your competitors are doing to steal your edge isn't enough, there's another issue you'll soon be facing if you haven't already.

Sound the trumpets and raise the drawbridge. The new consumer technology that's here in some metropolitan locations and on the horizon in smaller towns is a thing called VoIP, which stands for voice over Internet protocol. Don't mind the alphabet soup; it's a technical way of saying that your customers can disconnect their phone lines and talk directly using the Internet.

Before you wave this off as just another technology to live with, you should know that it means a lot to your job as an alarm systems dealer. The thing that industry insiders, like Honeywell Security and Custom Electronics's Vice President of Marketing Gordon Hope, will tell you is that VoIP will change how you do business.

In the world of VoIP, you have some solutions providers, such as Vonage, that simply sell customers the hardware that they need to connect to their existing computer and high-speed connection to create a phone system that uses Internet bandwidth. This is called a non-facilities based solution. Then you have the big players - companies like AT&T, Cablevision, Time Warner Calbe and Verizon - that use a facilities-based solution, meaning that the technology isn't in the box you have, but is in their telecom facilities and that they provide you with the high-speed connection too. These are the companies that are doing heavy marketing of VoIP, and it's selling.

Consider the following: A recent offer from Verizon's VoIP division (the service is called Voicewing), promotes VoIP calling for just $29.95 a month when you add that to existing Verizon DSL service, or $34.95 a month by itself. It's a deal that many customers are biting on. With included features like unlimited local and long distance calling, voicemail with email notification, caller ID, three-way calling, a phone/address book that integrates into your PC software, $.05/a minute or less to places like Australia, Aruba, Italy, Canada and Israel, it's not hard to understand why the American public is starting to make the switch from POTS (plain old telephone service) to VoIP.

So what's that have to do with the security industry? Lots, unfortunately.