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March 28, 1996

University's voice mail systems will be upgraded to meet demand

If you're frequently getting busy signals when you phone for your AUDIX voice-mail messages, or if your telephone rings more than four times before the system allows callers to leave you messages, you're not alone.

The University's voice-mail systems are approaching maximum capacity, said Bruce A. Hutchison, director of Pitt's Office of Telecommunications. A growing number of faculty, staff and students are competing for available connections, he said — especially at peak times such as Monday mornings and the first work day after a University holiday, when many voice-mail subscribers check for messages.

But Pitt Telecommunications staff plans to expand and upgrade the AUDIX systems, adding connections as well as capacity for new features such as sharing data between users' voice-mail and their personal computers, Hutchison said.

By mid-May, he said, the University plans to improve two of its voice-mail systems:

* The system, jointly operated by Pitt and AT&T, that serves approximately 3,500 faculty, staff and administrators. The current 32-connection capacity will be doubled, meaning that 64 users will be able to call into the system at any given time.

* The Bell Atlantic Centrex system that serves some 800 Pitt personnel at buildings in Oakland too far from the center of campus to make it economically viable for them to be connected to the AT&T system. This system's 16 connections will be increased to 24, Hutchison said.

The remaining system, a Pitt-AT&T network that serves approximately 5,100 students in University residence halls, is scheduled to be upgraded by early July, Hutchison said. The student system's 32 connections will be increased to 70, he said.

In addition to boosting capacity, Telecommunications will upgrade the systems to accommodate new technical features such as linking users' voice-mail and e-mail accounts. "With the new software that's available, it would be possible to integrate your voice-mail and e-mail so that you could store voice-mail messages on your personal computer, for example. Or you could connect the two systems so that your voice-mail would alert you when you have an e-mail message, and vice versa," Hutchison said.

He emphasized that Pitt has no immediate plans to add those services, but Telecommunications will install the basic technology to allow for such improvements in the future.

Hutchison said the voice-mail traffic jam is unrelated to the growing number of broadcast information messages on Pitt's voice-mail systems. The messages advertise Pitt athletics and cultural events, updates on University parking and other news. Hutchison said the messages tend to be brief and do not, by themselves, cause voice-mail message lights to flash on users' phones. "Our office has been monitoring the broadcast messages. We haven't seen a noticeable change in the volume of voice-mail traffic as a result of them," he said.

— Bruce Steele


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