New Business Telephone System to be Installed in Municipal Center

A planned phone line outage in the Lincolnwood municipal center on July 28 from 7 and 7:30 a.m, the municipals offices will only be accepting emergency phone calls. These calls will also be routed to the Skokie dispatch center. The main reason of this phone outage is to install a new business telephone system. The Lincolnwood municipal centers old phone system is about 20 years old and needs to be updated. The new business telephone system has more features and functions better, says the assistant village administrator, Douglas Petroshius.

The municipal centers present phone system was installed back in 1990, when the building was constructed. A couple of years passed and the counties public works and main facilities was built. This caused a different telephone system to be installed. There were several system and operational deficiencies with the old system such as static heard during phone conversations and equipment failures. According to Petroshius, 6 outgoing and incoming phone lines resulted with busy signals. The system also had the inability to relocate voicemail messages and connecting the public works facility's phone line with the municipal centers lines. During weather emergency, the system fails to allow the expansion of call takers.

The county board approved an upgrade for the municipal centers telephone system in 1999. This business telephone system, which is form Ameritech, Inc. replaced the Nortel system that the municipality had. After which, the telephone system found in the public works department was upgraded by SBC Business Communications in 2002.

However, both the upgrades for the municipal center and public works department phone lines still experienced difficulties. These would include lack of accounting capability for incoming and outgoing calls, limited connectivity tools for mobile workers, a cumbersome and expensive process in changing features and adapting systems to the systems operational needs and having a separate voicemail system for the public works department and the village hall.

Because of this, the municipality decided to replace both the systems with one linked phone system form Avaya. Avaya, one of the largest phone system producer and manufacturer, purchased Nortel a few years ago. Since the municipalities Nortel phone system can't be upgraded, they decided to replace it. The new system will be working with VoIP technology. Voice over Internet Protocol works by harnessing the internet to place calls and has more features compared to traditional telephone systems.

Since circuits are involved, the old system must be turned off for safety purposes, Petroshius added.