"LAPD High Tech headquarters" upgrade with insufficient budget? Bean counters defining the project plan? If that is the case, this upgrade was fucked from the start, maybe purposely. I would not be at all surprised if there are other issues besides the phone system. Like a high school kid spec'd out this project. Maybe it's just me, but I find this to be jaw dropping incompetence at the level of DEI madness. I've planned and executed intensive projects requiring in-house hardware and software development to meet new product introduction; unforced errors were not allowed, I would have been fired or told to start looking.
The article states:
The business phone system's servers went down during a power test March 28, and the city's Information Technology Agency has not been able to resolve the problems, city officials told the I-Team.
I have to assume that the system was as old as the building, and simply did what 15 year old computers can do - died when power cycled.
The definition of "High Tech Headquarters" should not include reusing antiquated phone systems known to be at the end of reliable service life. Maybe I hold too many high expectations when they claim "High Tech Headquarters". Swapping out old servers is not a science project, nor expensive in the grand scheme of things when lives are at stake. I'd fire them for incompetence. This was not a seamless transition. As old as LAPD is and all of the technical upgrades they has seen over the years (including phones), this project was poorly planned and exhibits unforced errors. I'd be furious. I'd be doubly furious that it hasn't been resolved after a month.
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.
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