During the evening of Tuesday, June 5th, Telkom will be performing maintenance on one of our main incoming telephone circuits. Work will start at 5.30PM, and is expected to be complete well before midnight.
All in-progress external telephone calls will be dropped when the circuit is first disconnected. In theory, the PBX will then automatically route any new calls via an alternative circuit. However this functionality has never been tested. As such you should expect to be unable to make or receive external telephone calls for the entire duration of the maintenance.
Should you need to make an emergency call during this time, please use a cell phone. Internal telephone calls to other extensions should be completely unaffected. Thus if you need to reach Campus Protection, you can do so from any PBX extension (rather than a cell phone).
During the maintenance period, Telkom will re-terminate a fibre optic cable in our Struben data centre and move the existing telephone termination equipment to a new rack. The Telkom fibre optic cable currently only carries some of the PRIs feeding our PBX, hence the interruption in telephone services. In future it is expected to carry other services -- this fibre optic work is part of the preliminary work necessary to prepare for the installation of SANReN's Grahamstown point-of-presence.
The PBX has alternative PRIs located in the Africa Media Matrix building, and all telephone services should fail onto these circuits. However, as mentioned above, this has never been fully tested. We will monitor what happens as a result of Telkom's work, and may make future changes to the PBX as a result of what we've learnt.
This maintenance work is being undertaken in the ITSC-approved scheduled maintenance window.