I grew up in this town in part of my young life. I don’t really miss the town that much, but as a kid, I had toured the legendary Central Station of the Londonderry, NH Fire Department. In recent years, the South Fire station built a new base and relocated, and the North Fire station was demolished and became a parking lot for the Senior Center, and was relocated closer to MHT, the large airport north of Boston.
I say legendary for Central because it looked much bigger as a preschooler. As an adult it looks really small. Just look below.
Earlier in the year, I guess they did a 40 minute reel of selling the idea of renovating their department. They even have their own web site, so I guess it passed some town election.
But hey you came here for the phones. In a bathroom!
Guess I’m not the only one right?
And yet I see another (with a Motorola radio, which is understandable.)
On a side note, you may wanted to know how the Town of Londonderry went to VOIP? It goes back all the way to the year 2000, when the town’s board, the Town Council, out of plain silliness approved for a 10 year, $1 million dollar contract with Verizon, the RBOC for New Hampshire for the time… for what? A Centrex contract! Ironically the Town used NEC’s Onyx Key based phone systems, so why the need for Centrex?
I lost contact with so many who were on the board at that time, so it’s left unanswered.
Circa 2004, the town had to cut this rising cost. They were one of the first small enterprises (public or private in the area) to cut the private 2-wires and went to Voice over IP, and went to use a Sphericall software based PBX, that ironically became part of NEC’s softswitch solution globally years later.
Based on my understanding, the employees that I knew refer them as “Internet” phones but whether it goes to a cloud now or not is unknown to me.
I am still amazed to see the many 66 Blocks that may be “active” despite the Town using VOIP for more than 15 years. The town outsourced IT for years and well, as you know if you cut corners, to then have a company follow the cutting corners mind of IT, the user gets shorted right? You would wonder if some of equipment was forgotten to be be disconnected, since you know IT and telecom are an oxymoron. I can’t speak with certainty, just had some suspicion with some of the knowledge I had at time when I still was living there.
But their deployment was based on reacting to the sticker shock. If only they spent a few minutes on a search engine at time to know the difference between the various business telephone trunking services, they wouldn’t have a hot mess in their closets.
When I was a kid, the dispatch area (which almost is at the same location) had several wall mount Trimlines perhaps from the Bell System era; and next to it was a Centracomm console (which was a specially built desk with radio controls made by Motorola.) With a lot of the change of technology, things got relocated. I didn’t see a Cisco VOIP phone in the dispatch room in the video part where I grabbed some pics. Why Cisco with a Polycom shop? Our E 9-1-1 system, is statewide and is handled by about 4 to 8 people on a daily basis by the state’s Department of Safety. When the State went to Cisco a decade plus ago, they installed at every local dispatch a Cisco phone using Anyconnect with a ASA firewall so if there was perhaps any failure at the State end, the local end could take over the call if their system went down? I never got a clear answer to why there are VPN phones at every local radio dispatch (which is an important fact, since no one in any town, even Londonderry answers 9-1-1 calls initially. They obviously answer to calls and dispatch via radio.
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