In a typical year, summers are busy for us, and then the workload tapers off in the fall, said Brian Abad, Telecom s customer service manager. This year we haven t seen any dropoff at all. In fact we re seeing a steady rise in workload, as well as a number of special projects. The replacements were necessary to prepare for a software upgrade to the UA s 5ESS phone switch. The entire campus seems to be a construction zone these days, and where there s construction there s telecommunications infrastructure to install wiring, jacks, routers, and other hardware required for phones to work and data to flow.
Every move entails many hours of work to get phones and data jacks connected.
We re stretched thin, Abad said. But we re keeping up. We re meeting our scheduled commitments, or even getting jobs done early. The flip side is that due dates for routine service calls are being pushed further into the future. We ve had to extend our response time somewhat, Abad said.