1) Cost
Monthly line rental on a fixed business landline will vary by operator and country, but we usually see between £30 to £60 a month. By comparison, typical SIM packages for GSM/GPRS devices are 50% to 75% less expensive. Over the lifespan of a typical device the running costs of GSM/GPRS devices can be several hundred Euros lower than with landline.
2) Time to Install
A cellular device can be installed by any lift engineer and activated immediately. The lift company is therefore no longer reliant on the telecommunications company to provide the landline installation, often not available in new builds or sites under construction, and rarely routed close to the machine room.
3) Data v DTMF
The Avire DCP supports a data channel allow digital information transfer from the lift installation back to a remote monitoring platform. Data is more reliable than analogue communication types (e.g. DTMF) and allows a greater variety of devices to be connected.
4) Reliability
If there is a fault with the landline the phone will stop working as there is no back up. If an Avire roaming SIM is used and a fault occurs with the transmission tower or network provider, the DCP will simply move onto the next available tower / network.
DTMF transfer was developed in the early 1960s for transferring information over telephone landlines. Cellular networks implemented DTMF in order to support legacy telephone hardware, however cellular networks compress the DTMF tones which can lead to distorted tone snot being recognised by receiver equipment. Each generation of cellular technology has provided a lower level of support for DTMF.
DTMF is increasingly seen as a legacy technology and it is forecast that support for the DTMF transfer will be withdrawn at some point in the future (dates vary by region and telecoms provider). In contrast data is an increasingly important part of our interconnected world and providers continue to invest in this area.