High tech is just a bunch of words and means nothing. To average idiot, a fiber line is "high tech," yet it's so cheap and easy to use that I pulled several lines through my house a few years ago just to future proof things. High tech is used to make YOU feel good about your tax dollars being spent on what's essentially technology from 100 years ago reimagined.
As for what their system is running on, this probably wasn't just x86 boxes running some hacked version of Asterisk. Most likely, it was some PBX system installed in 2009 with the building and never upgraded. That's long past end of life, and even with that recent of a date the VOIP landscape is littered with companies and products that no longer exist and have no service or parts available. You can't just "swap them out," because you need like for like and go ahead - call 3Com and tell them your PBX is dead. They don't exist anymore. There's a chance that whomever was providing service won't anymore either. I've run into both.
You'd be absolutely right to be furious that this hasn't been resolved, but unless the system was continuously upgraded, you have to point at people who refuse to give budgets for technology upgrades.
One would think that if someone (supposedlly they are an expert) was educated about PBX systems, longevity, manufacturer stability, this would have been addressed by the transition project plan with a complete phone system upgrade. Again, this points to the project manager. If the project manager brought up the issue during project plan development spec and review, and the bean counters refused the phone upgrade, okay, the project manager doesn't own this failure. The DEI bean counter owns it. I worked in "High Tech" all of my career, I have lived through bleeding edge tech, best in class expectations accompany that phrase. I guess I am offended that the term has been hijacked and is now just a "sounds great" selling point to unwary customers.
I agree - if the original project plan didn't include an upgrade at some point - 10 years is probably good - then they suck.
I imagine even if there was a plan, it probably was poopoo'd as not necessary because the old mechanical switch lasted 60 years, why won't this fancy new electronic one that's running on a couple of IDE 1GB hard drives?
I just tossed a complete Avaya PBX system, and a Merlin 820D2. Both were EOL, but the Avaya VOIP PBX was barely 10 - the Merlin was well over 40 and was given to a hobbyist who wanted to bring it up in his house. The Avaya was dying due to the aforementioned hard drive failure and the fact that the OS was on a CF card. Whomever thought that was a good idea should be shot.
The Merlin was acting up but it was still going fuck you, I'm routing calls until the world ends.
(post is archived)