The communication issues for all Marshall County facilities should improve after a decision by the Marshall County Commissioners Monday morning.
IT Director Michael Marshall explained that there was a fiber optics outage recently which affected communications at the county level. Marshall said he was notified of the outage a couple of days before the outage occurred and he in turn notified Jail Communications Director Matt Pitney as well as Dan Sammartano from Hyperwave.
“They start scrambling to find a way to keep our administrative phones up and running,” said Marshall. “We had never been concerned about our 911 lines because we’ve lost fiber before and they’ve always worked. Sometime in the past someone made the decision that digital is now using the same fiber highway that we’re using. So, when ChoiceLight cut our service we lost our 911 lines. Well, we did the best we could and long-term we’re going to have to find something else.”
Another outage is expected during a 10-hour window this weekend. Marshall said there is not enough time to get the necessary equipment in place to prepare for the outage this weekend, but Sammartano recommended a plan to avoid future fiber optics interruptions in internet, non-emergency phone service and the 911 service communications.
Sammartano commented, “All three of those right now go through the Midwest Network Cooperative (MNC). That’s the primary service provider for the county. We have a back-up connection through Surf Broadband. What we want to do is take Surf Broadband and RTC as well as the MNC to have all three a redundant path out to the internet so at any point in time we have three different providers feeding 911, non-emergency phones and internet service. If one goes down, it instantly fails over to the next one.”
According to Marshall, the work should be fairly simple to do, but it will take a little bit time to purchase and install routers and for the collaboration of providers to make this happen.
“It will be three to four weeks for this to be operational,” said Sammartano.
Marshall added, “This is a process. This isn’t a product that we’re purchasing. It’s something we’re going to have to manufacture.”
For now, when the outage occurs, calls to the Marshall County Jail are directed to the Kosciusko County Jail in order to assist Marshall County residents.
The overall cost will be $22,250.70 which includes hardware and an annual cost of $350 for the IP addresses. The commissioners approved the proposal with a unanimous vote.
