Parliamentary Search

Written question asked by Lord Spellar (Labour) on Thursday, 9 May 2024, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Tuesday, 14 May 2024 (named day). It was answered by Charles Walker (Conservative) on Wednesday, 15 May 2024 on behalf of the House of Commons Commission.

Parliamentary Estate: Telephone Systems

Question

To ask the hon. Member for Broxbourne, representing the House of Commons Commission, for what reason the Polycom phone system malfunctioned on 9 May 2024.

Answer

I am sorry that the right hon. Member and all colleagues continue to experience inconvenience in telephony services which are currently below standard. The latest issue with handsets underlines the need for the solution which the Parliamentary Digital Service is implementing later this year.

Polycom devices need to communicate with an external supplier to register the device and make/receive calls. Each device communicates with one of two external servers. One of the servers experienced issues on Thursday 9 May and any device that attempted to connect to this server was impacted by the outage. Polycom phones communicating with the working server did not experience an outage.

The first report the Digital Service received of handsets not working was at 12.13pm on Thursday 9 May. The team declared a major incident shortly afterwards and service was restored at 9.46am on 10 May.

The Voice Programme is upgrading and replacing the existing telephony infrastructure and when implemented, handsets will have 99.999% reliability of connecting.

Secondary information

Type
Written question
Reference
25405
Session
2023-24
Subjects
Telephone systems Parliamentary estate Outages
Link
View this Written question on www.parliament.uk