Information Technology Services

Police Dispatch Phone Outage

Outage category: Telephone

Location: All Dispatch phones (Nortel system) are not able to make outgoing calls, only receive them All users still on the PBX Nortel system (faxes, modems, elevators, some classrooms)

Status: Closed

Resolved Alert:

Initial Symptoms

Police could not out dial. Received a failed message.

Root Cause Analysis

Cause

Between GMU and th3 vendor sits a box that regulates what traffic is allowed to enter GMU or exit GMU.
This box is calls SBC. You have two; one for inbound traffic and one for outbound traffic. If one stops working the other takes on all traffic.
We rebooted only the inbound SBC. While it was rebooting the traffic started working, i.e.: the Outbound server took on all traffic. We could not confirm that both servers are working as we can’t trace any traffic on either server.

We worked with a third tier engineer. Since dispatch is now able to receive and make calls on the Nortel phones. We will work to get a third tier engineer Monday to confirm bother servers are working correctly.

Resolution

The SBC was rebooted.

Prevention

The issue was hardware failure thus only prevention is to have spare equipment or redundancy as is currently in place.