We are delighted to bring you some very exciting updates from the IS Telecoms team.
Matthew Craughwell and Verity Sullivan have been very busy working on transforming telecommunications for the University to make it easier for people to communicate.
Currently, we are using the old style analogue and digital phone plugged into a media gateway. This allows these legacy devices to communicate with our voice servers just like an IP telephone or endpoint. The gateways become an overhead to maintain, a point of failure in the network and the extensions still need to be moved by an engineer using the cabling installed throughout the building.
By moving to IP, the phones are simply connected to the network. They download their configuration and then set-up connections to a primary server and a backup server directly with no need for the gateway in-between and should either server fail, the telephone will continue to operate. We can then remove the gateways saving the cost of maintaining this hardware.
The aim is to have this system in place by the end of July 2016, just in time for Clearing!
The team are also looking at creating the same resilience in the incoming lines so we never lose connection to the public telephone network for incoming and outgoing calls as we are currently using old fixed telephone lines/circuits.
The eventual goal is to give people the ability to communicate efficiently with one another from any device and any location.
