by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
UNM's transition to a new telephone switch is more than 60 percent complete, said Paula Loendorf, director of telecommunications.
The switch is the device that connects calls and provides a dial tone.
The crossover was accelerated June 19 when technicians moved twice as fast as originally planned, she said. It is scheduled to be completed June 23, she said.
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The decision to speed up the change was because the old switch was becoming unstable, especially the last three weeks, she said.
"We didn't want to take any chances that the telephone switch would not function," she said. "Generally, a lot of people take telephone service for granted, and over the past three weeks we haven't been able to."
The change caused rolling outages of telephone service to the UNM campus.
Student Theresa Lujan, an accounting clerk in the Department of Art and Art history, said the change was a minor inconvenience.
"I had a couple of problems Monday morning with calling people, but I just called them on a different phone," she said. "It wasn't so bad."
She said she approves of the upgrade.
"I think it's a good thing," she said. "If something's getting old, it's good to replace it."
Mark Reynolds, operations manager at telecommunications, said the change is going better than expected.
"We haven't had anything that hasn't been able to be fixed. There's nothing major," he said. "It's gone way above where we thought it would be."
The staff members performing the change have been working up to 12 hours a day, he said.
The new switch will allow easier maintenance, he said.
It will also take less time for calls to connect, Loendorf said.
"We purchased some functionality in this equipment that over time will allow us to take advantage of some new features," she said. "Over time it should drive costs down in terms of personnel."
The cost of the upgrade, which included an upgrade to UNM Hospital's switch, was about $5 million, she said.
The price is worth it, she said.
"The current switch that we have has been running for 20 years with upgrades, so they work for a very long time," she said. "The switch can run practically as long as we need it to - probably 15 or 20 years."
The hardest part of the change was the possibility that something might go wrong, she said.
"So many people rely on the telephone system to do their job," she said. "Having 10,000 or 12,000 people who might not be able to make or receive calls was a scary thought."
