Why is the University's telephony service being replaced?
The University's existing telephony service (Chorus) is made up of two types of telephone lines:
The reasons for replacing this service are:
- BT announced plans to switch off all analogue telephone services, which are used by the University's critical and analogue lines, by January 2027 with some exchanges being switched off as early as January 2026
- the current contract with Mitel (Atos) for the Chorus service is due to end in July 2026 and the University has taken this opportunity to assess suppliers
- manufacturer support (provided by Mitel) for the 17,000 Unify telephone handsets (desk phones) in use across the collegiate University ended in July 2023. The handsets are currently considered to be a low security risk because they are not connected to the internet so we can continue to use them until a new supplier system is in place.
How is the telephony replacement being managed?
The Telephony Replacement project will manage the transition to a new telephony service. The project is recommending moving to Teams Phone (also referred to as Telephony over Teams at the University), leveraging the University's relationship with Microsoft. There are two elements to the project and further detail is available from the dedicated webpages for each:
- Replacement of analogue and critical lines
- Replacement of digital lines (VoIP telephony)
What are analogue, critical and digital (VoIP) telephone lines?
- critical lines are telephone lines that serve critical services, such as lift phones, alarm lines, and backup lines for college lodges. They can be used for inbound and outbound phone calls and will continue to work in the event of power outages or disruption to the Chorus phone system. They use dedicated copper wiring and network infrastructure, and have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which means that outages should be responded to by our suppliers within 4 hours
- analogue lines are like critical lines and use the same network infrastructure. The difference is that they usually provide telephony to a legacy device which cannot be digital, and that service is not critical to life or business operations
- VoIP telephony is another term for digital phone lines. Your Chorus desk phone uses VoIP telephony so is a digital line
