[cisco-voip] Copper plant

[Lelio Fulgenzi]

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.notarianni at scranton.edu> wrote:



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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

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