When Margaret pressed her pendant during a power cut at 3 AM, her call for help never reached the alarm centre. The local mobile mast had no battery backup, and the ARC were not notified. This example highlights a critical issue in Technology Enabled Care. In fact, almost two million people in the UK currently rely on TEC services, yet many systems contain hidden vulnerabilities that can leave users isolated when they need help most.
Understanding the Critical Risks in TEC Systems
The major challenge in TEC is ensuring alarms successfully travel from a user's device to the ARC. This journey involves multiple components, each representing a potential failure point that could break the important communication chain.
The Primary Risk: When Alarms Don't Get Through
The key risk is the alarm failing to reach its destination. Ambulance services receive around 2,600 calls daily from TEC providers, which highlights how vital the reliability of the alarm system needs to be.
If we use the example of John, whose diabetes emergency required immediate help. His pendant signal needed to travel from his device, through his home internet connection, across networks, and into the cloud-based alarm system before reaching the Alarm Receiving Centre. Any failure along this path could have life-threatening consequences.
The two biggest risks are power loss of the alarm unit and communication pathway disruption. UK power outages last up to two and a half hours on average, but some are much longer, particularly in rural areas.
The Infrastructure Reality: Mobile Masts Are Vulnerable
As our CEO Richard Keyse, recently highlighted, there's misinformation about mobile network resilience. The reality is: only 20% of UK mobile masts have 1+ hour battery backup, and just 5% have up to 6 hours backup. This means during power outages, mobile masts often become the first failure point, well before TEC devices themselves lose power.
When the local mast fails, even multiple SIM cards from different operators won't help if they rely on the same physical infrastructure. This makes SIM-only solutions particularly vulnerable to local infrastructure failures.
Common User Mistakes
Beyond technical failures, simple human actions create significant risks. Mrs. Henderson routinely unplugged her alarm unit at night because the LED light disturbed her sleep. When she forgot to plug it back in before going to bed, an incident at night would leave her with no way to call for help.
User education helps, but human nature remains a persistent challenge in maintaining TEC reliability.
Identifying Single Points of Failure
A single point of failure is any component that, if it broke, would bring down the entire alarm system. Understanding these issues is essential for building truly resilient TEC systems.
What Can Go Wrong?
The alarm unit and its power source represent the first potential failure point. Digital alarm units require consistent power to maintain network connections and process alarms effectively.
Network infrastructure includes internet routers, broadband connections, and Wi-Fi networks.
Mobile network components present another layer of concern. This includes the cellular mast, the network operator's infrastructure, and the broader telecommunications backbone. As our CEO Richard Keyse, emphasises in a recent post, removing these single points of failure between source and destination is crucial for true resilience.
The Cascade Effect
In modern telecommunications failures rarely occur in isolation. The number of power cuts has shrunk significantly since 1990 alongside a 60% cut in the length of outages, but when they occur, the effects can cascade through multiple systems.
During power outages, the few masts with battery backup become overwhelmed with traffic from devices seeking alternative connections. This creates a disrupted service even where backup power exists.
The Reality Check: Why Current Approaches Fall Short
Many TEC providers focus on extending battery life or adding more SIM cards, but these approaches miss the fundamental issue. Multiple SIM cards provide no additional resilience if they depend on the same physical mast.
The reality is that the infrastructure often leaves device-level improvements meaningless. A TEC alarm unit with 12-hour battery life becomes useless within one hour if the local mobile mast fails. Understanding the entire communication chain is crucial for anyone responsible for alarm units and the lives that depend on them.
True resilience requires a fundamentally different approach to alarm unit design. In our next article, we'll explore proven strategies for building TEC systems that address these vulnerabilities through multiple pathway redundancy and intelligent switching.
Next: Read our follow-up article "How to Build Resilient TEC Systems" to discover how to eliminate these vulnerabilities and create truly reliable emergency communication systems.