This was taken last fall at a local cable access facility whom I still have great rapport with. The story behind this image was bad luck hit the facility as they got flooded in a water main break last summer.
Fortunately their equipment got unscathed, and nobody didn’t get hurt. Could’ve been a lot worse.
After the incident, I offered to take a couple hundred pictures of equipment and other images for marketing purposes. I appreciate the friend of mine to post this as I don’t own the rights!
So the story goes of this town being an early adopter of Voice over IP systems well over a decade ago. In 2000, the local Town Council voted with a very naive mind on a 10 year contract with Verizon (our then RBOC) with a $1 million dollar contract for Centrex services. Funny thing, was the town had TIE/Nitsuko Key telephone systems in most of their facilities – including this building for a few years. There is still no answer why the town went to a Centrex contract despite using in house systems for years. As the cost of telephony went up, the town needed to curb off the costs (because the heads of that board had no idea about IT let alone telephone services. I’d be the lone guy rejecting that contract!) What didn’t help was citizens wanted the community to pour money into a school district of a $70 million budget, and expect the town government of nearly 2/3s less to “run like a business”. I believe the schools that doesn’t “run like a business” are still using a Telrad digital telephony system from almost 20 years ago. Telrad is out of business for American customers I believe today.
But I digress.
This was the time when the town invested heavily in IT based solutions (err changing with a Microsoft mindset) which in this case included a software based PBX and a boatload of Polycom VOIP telephones. They acquired the very first generation of SoundPoints (and I am not sure if it was SIP, MGCP, etc.) They were not capable of running POE at the switching part, so if the town hall lost power (which – has happened), then all calls at the desktop could be dropped. Every phone in the town hall (and the facility) had little power adaptors.
I must know too much, maybe because I used to live in this community… and it is public knowledge as they said this out in open and recorded meetings.
Anyways years went by, and all of a sudden, I’ve noticed these 3×1 series there. I don’t know if these are POE, or dual Ethernet per to the spec sheets, and I didn’t care to look at the bottom of the sets. I believe prior to was running in a MGCP environment, and now with mandatory SIP as the standard, ether they went to the cloud or upgraded the software on the server to support SIP. (Was told by one of the staff that their “phone lines are over the Internet” – that vague statement could mean anything: on site, off site – the cloud, remote access – like VPN, or Internet Protocol i.e. traveling over the local network.)
You have know about my opinions of IP based Polycoms for years, it’s design is horrible, and the ideas for all cords to just hang loose drives me crazy! I like the Aastra IP based 390s or the ones that look more like Nortels, and the Mitels (I mean the 5200 and 5300 series) for SIP telephony.
This set was taken in an edit room, I’d thought I’d share this one too. They use Apple hardware with some other solutions. Oh and security nuts, don’t worry about seeing that Snow Leopard desktop, these things aren’t connected to the Internet = limits the vulernabilities of “attacks” of the last great Mac OS X release.
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