By Bill Steele
In 1986, Cornell spent $17.4 million to upgrade its telephone system and become, in effect, its own phone company. The investment has paid off.
"Ten years later the system is still healthy, and we have not had a rate increase in 10 years," said Pat Searles, assistant director of network and telecommunications services for Cornell Information Technologies. Searles and CIT are informally observing the 10th birthday of Cornell's PBX (Private Branch Exchange) telephone system.
Before the system was installed, calls to and from phones on campus went through a "Centrex" switching system owned and operated by New York Telephone Co. (now NYNEX). Every phone on campus required a pair of wires leading back to the phone company. To keep costs down, there was a lot of sharing of lines, Searles recalled.
With a PBX, calls from one phone to another on campus go through the university's own switching center, while calls going outside are routed to one of about 1,000 lines to NYNEX. At the time of the installation, Searles said, there were about 11,500 phones on campus, sharing about 5,000 lines. Today there are about 16,000 phones, she said, most with their own unique numbers.
Under the old system, there also were several hundred lines into what was called "The WATSbox," which handled long-distance calls. Users had to enter an authorization code to make each long-distance call. The new setup allowed the university to negotiate separately with a long-distance carrier, in effect buying long-distance service in bulk and reselling it to departments. The result has been a significant reduction in long-distance rates, Searles said. The university currently buys its long-distance service from AT&T.
In addition to installing new central switching equipment, CIT "totally rewired the campus," Searles recalled, "with brand new cable, including fiber. We pulled additional fiber for future use."
The system also changed from analog to digital. New digital telephones on the desktop could handle the services that previously required local equipment in corners of buildings all over campus. "Through software we can now give people the equivalent of a multi-line phone with one skinny wire instead of a bulky 25-wire cable," Searles said. Every phone is also capable of multi-party conferencing, hold, call forwarding, transfer, speed and repeat dialing and other services, and Audix, a centralized voice mail system, became available to every user.
The central switching system, once actually composed of switches, was replaced by a computer. In 1986 the computer ran software called "System 85" (a trade name, unrelated to the year it was purchased). A few years ago, this was replaced by new software called "Definity."
Even as CIT celebrates this anniversary, it is preparing to phase out the PBX system, (see story, Computer plan links phones to computers).
That's OK with Searles, who figures the university got more than its money's worth out of the PBX installation. "It has more than served its useful purpose," she said. "In these days of technology explosion, to have bought something that has served well for 10 to 12 years was a good investment and a good choice."