If your alarm calls out over 3G, it may already be talking to nobody.

To be clear about what has and has not happened

Rogers Smart Home Monitoring has not been shut down, and we are not going to tell you it has to make a sale. What Rogers did announce is narrower and still matters:

• From 26 September 2025, the cellular backup feature on the current touchpad stops working.
• Wireless Two-Way Voice no longer reaches the touchpad — the station calls your phone numbers instead.
• App notifications will not work during an outage.
• The Web Control Centre has been retired; everything is in the app.

If you are staying with Rogers, do this today: go into the app and make sure your phone numbers and emergency contacts are current. If the station can only reach you by phone, the phone numbers had better be right.

The bigger one: 2G and 3G are going away everywhere

This is not a Rogers problem, it is an industry one. Every carrier is clearing 2G and 3G to reuse the spectrum. Any alarm panel whose only route to the monitoring station is an old cellular communicator will, at some point, stop reporting.

Here is the part that catches people. A panel that cannot reach the station does not announce it in a way anyone acts on. It arms. It disarms. It beeps at you the same as always. A trouble light nobody has looked at since 2014 comes on. The first time you find out is the time it mattered.

Thirty-second check: if your system was installed before roughly 2019 and has a cellular communicator, it is worth checking. Send us the panel model and we will tell you what radio is in it. Panels and communicators we work with.

And the one that has caught people for years: VoIP

Ask: did my alarm ever go over a phone line, and is that line still a real one?

If your panel dials out over a phone line and that line was moved to internet or cable phone, the alarm signal does not survive the conversion. The phone keeps working perfectly, so nothing looks wrong. Meanwhile the panel has been dialling into silence, sometimes for years.

This is the single most common dead system we find in Ottawa, and it is usually discovered by us, during a takeover, on a system somebody has been paying to have monitored the whole time.

What fixing it looks like

In most cases the panel stays. A modern LTE communicator gives it its own cellular path to the station, independent of your phone line and your internet — and the same module is what puts the system on the Alarm.com app in the first place. Your keypads, door contacts and motions stay exactly where they are.

If your panel is the proprietary all-in-one sort, it cannot take a third-party communicator and needs replacing. We will say which of the two you have before you spend anything.

The cheapest way onto Alarm.com for an older dialer panel is our Universal Communicator plan — the rate and what it includes are published here, like everything else on this site.

Test your system, whoever monitors it

You are entitled to ask your monitoring company to put your account on test and confirm they received a signal. It costs nothing and it takes one phone call. If you have not done it in a year, do it this week — with us, with Rogers, with anybody.

How to run a proper test, step by step, with the numbers to call: on our support page. We put it there because we would rather you tested a competitor’s system than had a dead one.