New Canaan's Information Technology Department turned on two new core network switches the Friday after Thanksgiving. The redundant switches are 10 times faster than the old ones which were installed in 2002, making it all that much quicker for the network to recover when there's a glitch in the system.
Residents will probably notice the upgrade most in the improved reliability of the town phone system. IT Director Chris Kaiser says that with about 1200 phones on the network, it used to take about five minutes to reset the system when there was a hiccup, now it takes less than a minute.
The town phone system went down over the summer because of a single device at the Department of Education started acting like a whole building, causing the phone system to slow to a crawl. The new switches came with upgraded software that will allow the town's IT engineers to quarantine a site on the network that is malfunctioning like that and prevent it from overloading the network.
Kaiser says he hopes his department can now sell off some of the old systems equipment they've been replacing and use the proceeds to upgrade all the buildings on the network. The two core switches cost more than $74,000, but that was still half what the department expected as technological advances have created cost efficiencies. Kaiser anticipates the upgrades to the rest of the system will be cheaper too.
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