We have our own copper plant and feed all our emergency type phones and call 
boxes from our emergency PBX.  It was a necessary addition during our migration 
from our old PBX to VoIP.  It has remained.  It just had its battery plant 
replaced. It’s supposed to stay alive for 12 hours.  Plenty of time to take 
care of evacuating places I think.

If we were ever required to replace it with traditional(?) VoIP it would have 
to be with an isolated router and analog gateway solution with SRST. We’d have 
to place similar analog sets at out campus police station to ensure they would 
still be able to contact them.  The isolated pod would need to have a stack of 
UPS and battery extenders to ensure long life during power outage. Although I’m 
not certain whether additional ups batteries give you more load capacity or 
more duration. 🤔

I did a proof of concept once, two 3900 series routers with SRST and HSRP and 
it worked great.  A couple of short ‘heartbeat’ cable between the routers 
ensured no split brain.

I once found a relay controlled 24 port patch panel that would have made an 
excellent addition to the fault tolerant design. Could never figure out though 
how to wire it up though.



Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 4, 2022, at 1:07 PM, Lisa Notarianni <lisa.notaria...@scranton.edu> 
wrote:



CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the University of Guelph. Do not 
click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the 
content is safe. If in doubt, forward suspicious emails to ith...@uoguelph.ca

Hello –

We are planning future projects and would appreciate input on what others have 
done with analog lines.  We currently use Verizon for over 500 analog lines on 
campus.  They provide service to call boxes, alarm lines, elevator lines, house 
phones etc…  We also don’t have network cable runs in some areas so we just 
kept the analog service running.

The idea behind all of this was to rely on Verizon Centrex service if our 
premise based VOIP phones or power went down and all phone service was lost on 
campus.  When we transitioned years ago to VoIP and moved the majority of lines 
away from Centrex, our General Counsel felt it would help with safety if we 
provided these phones in case of emergency.  I recently passed this by General 
Counsel and they still feel we need to continue to use this service for the 
same reason.  But I think the clock is ticking and from what I understand 
Verizon is abandoning copper.  They have suggested we transition to their VoIP 
service but it wouldn’t make sense to do that since they rely on our power. So, 
we would just switch to VoIP if we were to do that.

I know there is also an LTE option but many callboxes are in fields or parking 
lots and the equipment is dated.  So, on top of needing to address this, we 
really don’t have funding to replace expensive callboxes to accommodate LTE 
service.  I know we really need to evaluate and rethink the need for this 
equipment.  We have considered transitioning the funding to a safety app that 
students, staff and faculty can use but again we would put the onus of safety 
on the user and their wireless phone – not preferred.

This is complicated for Higher Ed.

Any solutions or steps anyone has taken?   Is Verizon really abandoning all 
copper?

Thanks,

Lisa

Lisa Notarianni
University of Scranton
Telecommunications Engineer
Infrastructure Services
800 Linden St.
Scranton PA 18510
570.941.4325

_______________________________________________
cisco-voip mailing list
cisco-voip@puck.nether.net
https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip
_______________________________________________
cisco-voip mailing list
cisco-voip@puck.nether.net
https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip

Reply via email to