Complaint Review: ADT Security Services - Boca Raton Florida

I currently work for ADT, going on 2.5 years, and ADT's advertising campaign is a joke. Remember the commercial with the 3d model of a house with one of the rooms flashing? ADT's alarm reporting is text-based through a telnet session. Their dispatchers don't see a spinning schematic of your house, they don't even see a simple, stationary, wire-frame schematic. No, your alarms are being displayed in a simple text formet, which is more cost effective, and, thankfully for ADT customers, takes less time to transmit alarm data from customer to dispatcher. But it gives customers a false sense of what happens when their alarm goes off.

And the commercial with all the zeros and ones, otherwise known as binary code, encompassing every surface/wall of the house? Also not graphically accurate as ADT doesn't install anything to monitor the walls, just the windows and doors. They will install motion detectors, but the wall can still be cut into, and customers tend to ignore motion detectors when nothing else goes off. Don't beleive me? Check police reports, one of our commercial customers was robbed when someone cut through drywall into their store, setting off only the motion detectors once they got inside. Because no external door or window zone went off the customer's emergency contact, which is usually a store manager, chose to cancel the police dispatch before the cops could arrive on scene. Thankfully for ADT, the decision to cancel the dispatch was not our mistake and we were not held liable, however the burglars got away everything they could carry. Critics would say that we use vibration sensors to monitor bank vaults, and those could be used to make sure no one went through our customers' walls... but what person is going to pay to have vibration sensors installed in their home? It costs enough just to get the basic security package, no one's going to pay for all external walls, even just the ones on the ground floor, wired with vibration sensors.

And as much respect as I have for Dell, their Optiplex line of computers is not "state-of-the-art." A variety of Dell Optiplex computers recently replaced most of our older HP Vectras, and while they are faster and look cooler, they're not state-of-the-art. They are, in fact, less than what I have at home, a Gen 4 XPS, also from Dell... which is also not state-of-the-art. And I'm pretty sure that to be a state-of-the-art building, the mold in the ceilings and under the carpet at the Aurora monitoring center would need to be removed. Which brings me to the final commercial, the one showing a high-tech looking monitoring center with a pair of very nice flatscreen tvs hangning from the ceiling. Purely theatrical. The monitoring floor is setup to provide the maximum number of workstations for the maximum number of people. Even the managers for the dispatchers have to share their desks with up to three other managers. The lights are not dark and dramatic, but that's a good thing, since it's hard enough for the night shift to stay awake with bright white fluorescent lights everywhere... with the lighting depicted in the commercial, even the day shift would be falling asleep at their desks.

Looks like false advertising to me... but that's just me.

Joe

Denver, Colorado
U.S.A.