Ready for 1st phase of phone rollout

Date Released: Thu, 27 January 2011 12:19 +0200

The first phase of the phone roll-out will take place next week, the 31st January, and will make use of the first batch of 200 working phones. The areas identified for the roll out are:

Research Office ~ 9 handsets
Hamilton Building ~ 40 handsets
Chem/Pharmacy building ~ 60 handsets
BioSci building ~ 55 handsets
HKE ~ 10 handsets
Sports Admin ~ 10 handsets

Exact details and timing will be communicated to staff in these areas in the next day or two.

Note that this roll-out schedule is different to the one proposed in October. The reason for the change is that the original high priority areas like Eden Grove and Finance are now busy with the start of year, and will only be looked at in March or April. The areas to be rolled out next week have been identified as those where substantial and quick savings can be made on Telkom line rental cancellations, and where problems are being experienced with Telkom equipment.

The next batch of 300 working phones is expected to be delivered by about the 7th Feb, and a further batch of 500 phones about 10 days later.

Other aspects of the roll-out are in hand:

The new switchboard is in place and is dealing with all incoming calls. Cutting over outgoing calls will be done early next week.

Telkom are installing new ISDN PRI's into Struben and AMM. These handle incoming Telkom calls, and they will be activated early next week.

The new telephone management system (TMS) which handles call billing is in the final stages of testing. This provides itemized billing, and produces information that can be transferred into Protea for processing by the Finance Division.

A least cost routing (LCR) mechanism is in place, and will route all outgoing calls - even those to local Grahamstown numbers - over the IP network via the most cost effective route. This means that calls to local numbers will be routed over the network to Johannesburg and placed over our LCR providers infrastructure at a lower cost than making a local Telkom call. Similarly for calls from the PBX to cell numbers.