UNM students, staff and faculty may have noticed an interruption of phone services on campus as they adjusted to the first day of the fall semester.
UNM Telecommunications Office officials said the cause of the "technical problem" had not yet been determined, but they had unofficially narrowed the problem down to one portion of the office's main core switch.
The main core switch is one of 22 switches on campus. A switch serves as a type of call center, responsible for routing calls for a specific area of campus officials said. Calls made on campus within a switch are routed through that switch, but calls from one switch to another, such as a call from Popejoy Hall to the UNM Hospital, must be routed through the main core switch.
Chris Vallejos, interim director of telecommunications, stressed that the problem was not the entire system failing, but that it was with one particular component in the works that kept the system from operating at peak performance.
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"It's like there's static in the middle," Vallejos said.
The problem, which could have been caused by any number of sources, including an abundance of phone calls, first caught an office engineer's attention at about 12 p.m., Vallejos said.
The first trouble began shortly after 3 p.m., officials said. Phone users on campus experienced five to ten second delays in getting dial tones to outside extensions, difficulty in connecting to other campus switches and were unable to access their campus voicemail system.
Also, phone users who tried to access call trees, audio menus that direct callers to specific extensions, were unable to because of the main core switch problem.
Vallejos said 911 emergency services on campus were down from about 3:20 p.m. to approximately 4:45 p.m., but that officials notified campus police immediately to coordinate and re-establish all emergency communications.
"Critical operations, which is the hospital and 911, are up and running at this time," Vallejos said at about 5 p.m. Monday. "That's always a priority."
As of 5:30, Vallejos said the system was at 100 percent, but that its speed was not as fast as usual. He added that they do not yet have a time frame for when the system will be running at full speed again.
Vallejos said UNM telecommunications staff was working with Qwest, the University's local exchange carrier, to determine how to best address the problem.
