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911 call service complications promote use of LiveSafe app

Sofia RositaniReporter

A mass email was sent to all students on campus after it was discovered that there were issues with the 911 call services.

On Oct. 30, Joseph Musante, who handles media relations, stated that the issue was software related, and the only way those on campus would be able to make calls is through their cell phone and the LiveSafe App.

Raymond Kellogg, the director for Computing and Infrastructure at Southern got the notification saying there was an issue with a failed 911 call from Granoff Hall at 3 p.m. on Oct. 30.

“We escalated the issue to our vendor support and requested they engage and assist in the troubleshooting process. A TAC call was made to Cisco and it was determined that an upgrade to our 911 system was necessary,” said Kellog.

While the system was down, Kellog said that not all 911 calls were failing, and, during the troubleshooting process, a call from Moore Field House went through successfully. He said he knew it was a sporadic “hit or miss” issue that they were dealing with.

Kellogg also said that it was not too difficult to get the service working again.

“Cisco Support let us know a previous upgrade to another application within our Unified Communications environment had caused several bugs that were adversely affecting 911 operations and that an
upgrade or patch to resolve was necessary.”

The issue was resolved by 9:50 p.m. on Oct. 30, and students received an email on Oct. 31 stating, “Existing issues yesterday with 911 Services and the Southern phone system were resolved last evening. All 911 Services have been upgraded, tested and are back in full operation.”

According to Kellogg, there is an update going on to upgrade the Blue Light phone systems so that it does not keep causing problems on campus for students. Chief of Police Joseph Dooley said, once the police realized the problem, they took immediate action.

“We learned that 911 was not working properly, so if someone dials from one of the Southern owned phones it should ring out to New Haven or Hamden depending on where you are in the campus,” he said.

“So when we learned it was not going through the program, we worked with Patrick Dilger’s office to get information out to the campus.”

Dooley said it was important that they put out notice in case someone was trying to call 911 from a university owned phone. He said they also worked with the IT Telecom group to make sure they were aware of the issue. However, Dooley said the most important concern was making people aware of the issue.

“If someone called 911, if their call was not going through, we wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that there was a problem,” said Dooley. “So we pushed it out through LiveSafe, and we pushed it out through email just to make people aware, and there was no issue that I was aware of as a result of that, and the issue was resolved rather quickly.”

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