this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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I see this sort of thing all the time.
There's a disconnect between the time scales for industrial equipment and the time scales for IT and telecommunications. A PLC running a factory might last 30 years, but the software to program and troubleshoot it won't run on modern operating systems or computers. The company doesn't want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade it when there's nothing wrong with it.
Same with telecommunications - POTS worked for a century, and over the last decade we've seen it largely disappear, which makes fire alarm panels everywhere inoperative. We recently ran into an issue where a fire marshall refused to allow anything but POTS and all of the non-end-of-life hardware only supported IP.
For those like me who don't know
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service
Also it's pretty ridiculous to have fire alarm systems be dependent on electricity and Internet...
It's difficult to eliminate the use of electricity, although generally you'd have them on a battery backup.
Internet is required to contact the fire department or other emergency center (these panels tend to do more than just fire). Used to be just phone lines using a touch tone code, but phone lines are going away. They're pushing hard for cloud solutions now for security panels - I imagine fire will go that way soon enough.