In an unusual diversification bid, St. Petersburg Cable TV, a major northwest Russian telecom also known as TKT, has launched a security service that fends off domestic trouble for homeowners from a distance. The Your Intelligent House package monitors a residence when the owner is away, alerting him to any household emergency or unwanted intrusion.
The telecom’s move could prove a major leg-up toward winning over a new market of homeowners and apartment renters in an upmarket software and hardware segment for advanced household security that is still in its infancy in Russia.
Posting a ‘sentry’
Your Intelligent House is a high-end monitoring system whose developers say tracks all changes in a house or apartment’s environment and reports any adverse incidents to the owner or tenant via mobile phone on a real-time basis. All that’s necessary to keep a regular eye on the property is access to the Internet: by managing a private virtual “control room” in a TKT-provided cloud, the owner/renter can customize his system any way he likes.
The core of the system is a network of security sensors positioned to cover both places that thieves typically frequent and areas where potentially malfunctioning utilities are located. According to TKT CEO Ruslan Yevseev, the company offers a range of sensors to detect window or door opening, movement by doors and within rooms and internal breakdowns such as smoke or gas emissions or water leaking through a cracked pipe.
Connected in a wireless network of barely visible “sentry posts,” the sensors immediately send emergency alerts to the system user’s mobile phone when a contingency is sighted. Each sensor is independently tasked to send a warning SMS.
An embryonic market
Widely marketed across Europe and the United States, home security systems are still testing the waters in Russia.
IP camera and sensor-based surveillance systems are offered by IT companies such as Perm’s Satellite Innovation, which is developing a cutting-edge Macroscop-branded IP video project and has reportedly established a partnership network of some 150 distributors from 17 Russian regions. The company claims that deploying this product for networked surveillance saves owners at least 75% of what they would spend on computers and servers to support conventional video surveillance systems.
