Alarm.com signals are slow or not received at all

We joined surety last week, and since yesterday afternoon, I have noticed that my alarm.com commands were slow or not happening at all. This never happened with our previous company, so it’s an unpleasant surprise.

To troubleshoot, I ran the cellular and wifi tests. They intermittently fail (when the commands to turn the light on or whatever else isn’t working).

I tried shutting down the panel, including unplugging the batter and power with no change in function.

I thought maybe the wifi was acting up (even though all other devices were working fine), so I turned off the wifi and ran on cellular only for a few hours, and that didn’t make a difference.

Any recommendations on how to correct this other than to keep shutting the panel down and restarting it?

The panel is about 3 years old, and up until yesterday, has been working perfectly.

Your panel is responding to cellular pings quickly at the moment, but broadband pings are not responding at the moment at all, so you probably do have a wifi connectivity issue. Do you still have the wifi disconnected?

You would see cellular latency on all commands if wifi is not working properly. Inbound command delays have occurred in the past on all carriers, though more frequently on Verizon modules, where inbound commands seem to have a routing issue with the carrier, usually associated with local carrier tower work.

I’m not seeing that delay on cellular at the moment,

With broadband connectivity, commands would be going out from Alarm.com concurrently on broadband, which would eliminate latency, but the wifi connection would need to be resolved.

If you have wifi reconnected but it is still not working, try an extended power down of the panel. Settings > Advanced Settings > Power Down. Leave it powered off for 20 minutes.

Reboot your router as well. After panel boot up, let us know and we can check connectivity.

Yes, it is connected to the Wi-Fi, and the Wi-Fi router is up and running again after a reboot. I also rebooted the panel.

The panel is connected to Wi-Fi ok and appears to be connected to the internet as its sending signals according to the router. But I am not getting a positive dual path Wi-Fi test.

Could there be a setting I need to set to communicate properly?

What is the ip or website that the panel sends signals to? I’d like to ping it from my computer to confirm it can be reached from my network.


Could there be a setting I need to set to communicate properly?

You certainly could have settings blocking communication, you may need to try disabling or adjusting the parental controls features you referenced previously.

What is the ip or website that the panel sends signals to? I’d like to ping it from my computer to confirm it can be reached from my network.

No need. I can tell you that I can send a cellular ping to the panel and request a broadband response, which works.

I cannot send a ping to the panel via broadband.

This means that your router is blocking inbound broadband commands, but outbound broadband signals are still going through.

I rebooted the router, changed DNS to default, turned off the firewall, and even tried putting the router in the DMZ. It continued to fail the dual-path test.

Also, when I tried to unlock the door after work, the communication failed until rebooted the panel.

This morning I updated the router’s firmware, and unplugged it again.

We also have an old Verizon router laying around. I plugged that directly into the fios terminal and connected the panel to the Verizon router via Wi-Fi. The dial-path test again timed out.
But the computer worked fine using the old router.

I believe I’ve done everything I can to test the router settings. The only other thing I can think of is port forwarding. Are there any special ports I should open up?

Can you try updating the firmware of that panel via the steps here:

I have seen prior cases where a panel cannot communicate with ADC, however can still reach the Qolsys firmware server. Any change after that?

If you are not able to update your panel’s software using the Wi-Fi connection, follow the steps below to use an SD card:

  1. Insert a micro SD card into your computer. *(We recommend using a “class 4” or higher micro SDHC card with 4gb-16gb storage space)

  2. Click the download link below (we recommend saving it to your desktop)
    DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE PATCH

  3. Once the file is downloaded:

  • Locate the file called “Software-Patch-270.zip”
  • Right click this file and select “Unzip” or “Open”
  • You should see a folder with three (3) files inside: “2.7.0rc26.20220331_b26_full_upgrade.zip” “release.txt” and “signature”
  • Drag ALL THREE files to your SD card. These are the ONLY files you’ll need, so delete ANY other files
  • Safely remove the SD card from your computer
  1. Slide your micro SD card into the slot on the right side of the IQ Panel.
  2. Swipe down from the top of the screen and touch “Settings”
  3. Touch “Advanced Settings” and enter a valid installer code (default is 1111)
  4. Touch “Upgrade Software”
  5. Touch “Upgrade Using SD Card”
  6. The panel will search the SD Card for the patch and begin downloading it automatically.
  7. Once complete touch “OK” to reboot the panel. DO NOT TOUCH THE SCREEN. The update process will take approximately 5 minutes. After the panel reboots the home screen will appear and the LED will turn green.
  8. Eject the SD Card:
  • Swipe down from the top of the screen and touch “Settings”
  • Touch “SD Card”
  • Touch “Unmount SD card”
  • Remove the SD Card from the side slot by pushing it in slightly, it should then “spring” back out

I was able to easily upgrade over wifi. Unfortunately, I am still having the same communication timeout.

Interesting, would you mind if I sent some troubleshooting commands to the system to reboot and turn the dual path off and on again?

I would like that. I will let the family know.

Unfortunately inbound broadband commands still fail after the commands. The system can reach ADC fine with broadband statuses, but ADC cannot reach the device.

I am sending you a private message with the proper source ports for your system to try port forwarding.

I just wanted to post an update so if anyone has a similar problem, they know the solution.

Our problem was that the panel wifi could send out signals to alarm.com, but would not accept alarm.com signals. The cellular worked fine, but sometimes the verizon connection was broken.

The solution was to do a factory reset of the panel. It required reconnecting all the devices, so it took a while. But it fixed it and since then everything has been smooth!