Tribal Offices continue to have limited phone service.
Warm Springs Telecom reports that they have exhausted efforts to repair their old switch that failed – taking out voice phone service to WSTC customers, including much of the Tribe. A team of engineers has worked to repair that system to no avail.
At the same time another team is working to complete installation of a new switch on a new network that will provide voice phone service. This work was planned for 2022 but has gotten bumped up with failure of the old system. Testing for both local and long distance service needs to be done as part of the installment process for the new system to get up and running. Data entry and programming is being done this week and then next week they will need to “port” phone numbers over to the new system.
So phone service will continue to be limited for Tribal programs through next week.
Late yesterday (2/28/22) access to the internet was lost to Tribal Offices. This is a completely separate issue from the phone problems. The cause of the outage is unknown and diagnosis is being done.
