Information Systems has announced the installation and conversion to a new 5ESS-2000 telephone switch, which is being installed to provide needed capacity and feature enhancements to the MIT telephone system. As a part of the installation procedure, a three-week moratorium on service requests is required to smoothly transition all 22,000 telephone lines.
During phase one of the new installation, from May 13-31, changes to telephone service, such as number changes, moves and the addition of new numbers, will be placed on hold. Additionally, feature changes initiated by customers through a telephone--changes to call forwarding, speed dialing, number of rings, etc.--will not be honored from noon Friday, May 24 until Tuesday, May 28.
In addition, customers will not be able to schedule new telehone service or changes to existing service that involve new switch equipment until June 25 when phase two of the installation will be complete.
The first phase of the installation will begin at 6 p.m. Friday, May 24 and continue through 6 a.m. Tuesday, May 28. After the completion of the first phase, all existing telephone services and additional capacity for the new dormitories will be handled by the new switch.
The second phase will begin at 6 p.m. Friday, June 21 and continue over the weekend until 6 a.m. Monday, June 23. Customer service representatives will schedule requests for telephone service that have been put on hold starting June 25. After the completion of the second phase, new capacity for telephone services will be available throughout the MIT community.
The three-week moratorium on changes will eliminate complexities in maintaining the old and new switch configurations concurrently and will ensure that Information Systems can respond to loss of dial tone and/or lack of telephone services during the cutover weekend May 24-28. Top priority will be assigned to critical Institute service areas, including Campus Police and MIT Medical. Telephone problems or outages should be reported in the normal manner, by calling 3-HELP (x3-4357) or sending email to 3help@mit.edu. Daily progress reports will be posted to the 3Down web page.
Questions about any aspect of this project can be sent to telecom-ops@mit.edu.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 1, 2002.
