It Update: Phone system switchover postponed
By: Jan Jones
December 22nd, 2006
Special message from Steve Zink, vice president for information technology:
The University’s new telephone system implementation will be not be taking place during the partial winter closure.
A number of factors, largely beyond the University’s control, forced a decision to cancel the implementation.
As in all undertakings, the safety and security of the University campus and its staff must always come first.
We are working with NEC (our new telephone systems provider) and AT&T to revise the switch-out date. We are exploring other implementation options, which will require a reordering of activities. At present, we are tentatively targeting the Martin Luther King three-day (Jan. 13 - 15) weekend to make the change.
This would still allow the transition to occur prior to the beginning of spring classes. I will notify you via a campus-wide email once a decision has been reached.
Briefly, the reasons for not proceeding with the originally planned date (today, Dec. 22) are the following:
- Some phone numbers were prematurely and randomly cut from service by AT&T in the early hours of Thursday morning without warning. Moreover, the numbers cut were not in our prescribed priority order that we had outlined to ensure that emergency, health, safety, and security services would be activated in the new telephone system almost immediately.
- In order to proceed with the new phone system, new telephone numbers had been acquired over two months ago. The new prefix (682) has not yet been recognized by all telephone systems across the country. The reason for this is unclear. We expect this to be resolved in the next few days.
- Most importantly, AT&T had not completed the 911 telephone assignments. In other words, the detailed information necessary for 911 to get geographical information was not active. AT&T is working on the issue.
While these matters might have been resolved quickly, the safety and security risk, however small, was deemed unacceptable.
We will continue working toward deployment of the new system and will address other issues and special requests and circumstances that you have brought to our attention.
I appreciate that many of you followed the instructions for the anticipated telephone change. I apologize for the inconvenience.
If you have specific questions or concerns, do not hesitate to contact me at stevenz@unr.edu or (775) 848-4706.
Steve Z.
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Jan Jones, technical communications specialist, Information Technologies, can be reached at janicej@unr.edu.
