City Halls in Massachusetts switched to VoIP:
The town of Milton has switched to Internet-based phone technology in Town Hall, joining Hingham as one of the first municipalities in the region to make the leap to a system on the cutting edge of communication technology.
The move was designed to eventually save money, but it also solves a more immediate problem: it had become increasingly difficult to find people who could repair what had become an archaic phone system, said town officials.
Milton Town Administrator David A. Colton said he expected savings of about $300 or $400 a month. The system cost about $40,000 to install.
”We had to get a new phone system because the old system was defunct," said Colton. ”It was old and archaic. . . . It was very expensive to call a service guy."
There is an added benefit for residents: The new system allows for quick changes so a town can, for example, set up a flu hot line ”in 20 minutes," said Steve Becker, Hingham’s manager of information services. It couldn’t be done before.
The system is called VoIP, or ”voice over Internet protocol." It uses the same underlying technology as the Internet.
With VoIP, the person making the call does not notice anything different. He or she gets the same dial tone and the phone generally looks the same, explained Michael E. Roberts, chairman of Milton’s Technology Committee, which helped the town make the switch. But underneath the surface, the technology is very different from old phone lines. The caller’s words are digitized and disassembled into packets of information that are sent whizzing across the Internet. At the other end, the packets are reassembled into speech.
Consumers and companies like it because it’s cheaper. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, a business analysis company, says by next year two-thirds of the world’s 2,000 largest companies will be using VoIP. And IDC Corp., a Framingham-based research company, has projected that its use in the United States will grow from 3 million people this year to 27 million in 2009.
And Vancouver, BC may do the same:
The City of Vancouver is considering switching to Voice over Internet Protocol, a state-of-the-art telephone system promising improved customer service, cost savings and internal operational efficiencies.
The city has 6,000 phones using equipment anywhere from eight to 20 years old, and in some cases facing end of manufacturer support.
Staff are recommending the city pay Planetworks Consulting Corp. about $60,000, plus taxes to help the city develop a corporate telephony strategy.
Becker, in the first story above, makes a good point about the flexibility of VoIP. If an emergency comes up, VoIP will allow them to react immediately, 24/7. With a traditional phone line, who knows how long you’d have to wait to get your telco to respond.
