April 13, 2012
After software patches failed to deliver substantial improvement, Avaya, our telephone vendor, advised Mason that our existing dialing plan was incompatible with the new Avaya technology and had to be redesigned. This required the manual entry and audit of more than 8000 phone numbers; this was completed over the past two weeks. Also, other system modifications were made to ensure that calls to 911 are not disrupted.
Mason, Avaya, and other vendors continue to address the problems that have caused a series of intermittent outages since new equipment was added to the telephone system last October. As work continues to resolve all of the remaining issues, we are taking steps to reduce service disruptions to users. We have accelerated the migration of all telephone lines off the old telephone system and will replace most of our legacy telephones with new Voice over IP (VoIP) phones connected to the new telephone system over the next six to twelve months.
We are keeping departmental telecom coordinators informed about the migration plans. Questions should be directed to the ITU Telecommunications Administration group at x3-3546. We appreciate your patience as we continue to address these issues.
Previous Information: Statement on Telephone System Outages from Dr. Joy Hughes, CIO