My office telephone is out, but I’m still working

My uni­ver­sity office tele­phone is out of ser­vice, along with all the Inter­net and tele­phones in 1166 and 1188 Fort Street Mall.

The recent rains and winds have blown our wire­less Inter­net link out of align­ment. The sys­tem uses a laser to con­nect the build­ings to the uni­ver­sity net­work. Laser sys­tems can han­dle much more band­width than WiFi or radio-based wire­less sys­tems, but lasers do need pre­cise, line-of-sight align­ment to work prop­erly. Radio sys­tems don’t need line-of-sight.

Because most of the tele­phones in these build­ings use voice over Inter­net Pro­to­col (VoIP) instead of tra­di­tional wired tele­phone ser­vice, so our tele­phones are as well.

Accord­ing to an announce­ment on our extranet, inbound calls are going directly to voice mail.

I keep a Clear­wire modem in my bag for these emer­gen­cies, so I do have email and Web access in my office. I’ll con­tinue grad­ing the IS 6100 midterms this morning.

Tagged as: Internet, reliability, VoIP