HILLS Industries has been busy. Over the past couple of years the company has cleverly repositioned itself as far more than an electronic security wholesaler. Hills is now a manufacturer and developer of security technology and each of its strategic moves underscores the melding of long experience and singular resolution. 

It’s only May and Hills has already made 2 pivotal moves this year. The first was the purchase of the exclusive rights to manufacture and sell the NX range of alarm panels in Australia and NZ. This agreement cleans up the relationship between DAS and GE’s alarm panels – guaranteeing the local alarm panel business while freeing up DAS to get on with product development at its own pace.

But the second move is more significant still. Through the acquisition of a controlling stake in comms and monitoring manufacturer UHS, and an alliance between DAS and Telstra, Hills has won an interest in the benchmark Telstra Secure monitoring service. What’s most interesting about this is that DAS won’t just be selling the UHS-built hardware – it’ll be supporting the monitoring services as well.

According to DAS’ Gabriel Daher, the year’s developments mesh together perfectly.

“This is an extremely important new direction for us,” Daher explains.

“The arrangement between Hills and Telstra for the provision of Telstra Secure is that DAS will have an agreement with control rooms and the control rooms will manage their connections and disconnections by dealing with Hills.

“Meanwhile, bureaus can buy the UHS Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) from Hills install it in the field and connect it to control rooms of their choice that are set up to support Telstra Secure.”

No account of Telstra Secure is complete without recognition of the fact that this solution is fully certified to Australian Standards C1 to C5.

“Today Telstra Secure it’s the only product that has certification to C5 - the certification is owned by Telstra not Hills and it’s certified on the Telstra VPN,” Daher explains. “This is a very important distinction. At no time are alarm signals on the Internet – instead this is a carrier-grade virtual private network.

“The Telstra Secure VPN has 2 parts – there’s a Land-based VPN and a wireless-based APN – that’s what the GPRS and Next-G services run on but they all come back to Telstra’s Next IP core which is the heart of the new Telstra network,” Daher explains.

“Telstra essentially provide all of the services so they manage all the servers and all the connections into the network,” he says. “If anything goes wrong calls are escalated to Telstra so it’s a fully managed Telstra solution.”

Ultra High Speed Solutions

While Hills has been talking to Telstra about Telstra Secure for some time now, at the core of Hills’ push into monitoring is the acquisition of a controlling 51 per cent of Ultra High Speed Solutions, a company founded by a group of Alcatel engineers way back in 2000.

“Importantly, UHS understands Securitel very well because Alcatel used to be the supplier of Securitel for Telstra,” he says. “For these and other reasons the latest generation of UHS product offers excellent connectivity and is the perfect Securitel replacement.”

The UHS acquisition is vital because it gives Hills access to UHS’ vaunted CPE, a device that carries alarm signals from multiple sources like wireless, Securitel STUs and other alarm devices, onto Telstra’s highly secure VPN. 

“Given its telco expertise the UHS team foresaw an inevitable change in telecommunications infrastructure a decade ago,” Daher explains. “More specifically they understood that telco systems would one day become a very large IP network and there would be many telco client vertical markets.

“These include traffic and roads, utilities, fire and security – all of which have many expensive legacy products that will not operate on the new IP networks,” Daher says. “UHS saw this as an opportunity to build a device that could translate all the old legacy product transmissions over the new IP networks – that device is the CPE.”

As Daher rightly points out, the process of developing a solution capable of carrying multiple alarm communications onto networks involved more than just building a solid state device to handle the task in the field. There was also server support, equipment for client sites and monitoring stations, as well as gear for inhouse monitoring centres. And there was significant software development as well.

“UHS saw security as a particularly important vertical for them and they put a lot of time into developing connectivity into the sort of communication paths we find in the security industry,” Daher says.

“And the fact security is an important part of the UHS strategy made UHS an important part of the Hills strategy,” he explains. 

Perhaps what’s most interesting in all this is the depth of Hills’ penetration into the monitoring market. Hills agreement with Telstra will see DAS become the preferred provider of Telstra Secure – it’s a powerful position for the company to be in.

Something else that’s obvious here is that Hills believes IP is the reporting path of the future.

“It’s clear to us that the humble alarm dialler has its days numbered and that ultimately IP communication is going to be standard not only in terms of communication from the alarm system to the monitoring centre but communication from the alarm system to handheld remote devices and back,” Daher explains.

“Telcos have chosen to go with IP as the protocol layer – they’re very keen not be lumped with one physical layer,” Daher says. “But this demands they have the ability to talk across many physical layers – satellite, radio (GPRS, GSM, Next-G, 3G), ADSL, BDSL and frame relay.

“The complexity of the task is clear to see,” he explains. “Telcos have to manage all those physical layers which end up at the same physical layer which is IP. So UHS had to make sure their equipment could manage all this.”

Daher says UHS has about 20 engineers and all come from the telecommunication industry.

“This telecommunications focus makes a lot sense – telco experience drove UHS to develop what we call telco grade equipment,” Daher explains. “A telco grade device has to be very robust and very reliable. It needs zero touch configuration, programming and setup and everything has to be accessible from a central point.

Daher says that on the basis of the company’s pedigree, UHS was chosen by a number of telcos around the world to provide high security alarm monitoring technology – the most notable being Telstra and British Telecom.

UHS’ Customer Premises Equipment