On Friday, April 8, at 4:30 p.m., ITS and our service provider, Lumen/CenturyLink will complete the move of campus telephone numbers to voice over IP (VOIP) service. The migration process could last up to four hours during which brief voice outages could occur on each number as it is moved to the new service.

This is the last major milestone in migrating away from Drake’s outdated phone systems to Microsoft Teams Calling. ITS acknowledges the transition to Teams for voice services has been difficult and caused frustration across campus due to poor call quality and dropped connections. We are optimistic that completing migration will address these issues by eliminating the need to route calls through old voice equipment. A pilot group of numbers was moved to the new voice trunk lines late last year and we have seen a marked improvement in voice quality and reliability in that group.

Additionally, ITS staff have been working with a third party vendor over the past several weeks to ensure Drake’s configuration of Teams Calling adheres to Microsoft’s best practices, prepare for the migration on Friday, and facilitate a smooth changeover to the new service. ITS is committed to improving Teams voice quality and trusts this investment will be another factor in improving the reliability of the system.

Thank you for your patience and support during this long transitional period away from our legacy voice system to Teams Calling.

— Chris Mielke, ITS