HILL AFB, Utah -- After nearly 40 years of operations, the 75th Communications and Information Directorate is deactivating its analog telephone switch and transitioning fully to digital.
“It’s been a big undertaking and required a lot of work,” said Jeff Coulter, installation telecommunications lead. “We’ve been working on this transition for several years and it’s finally finished.”
The switch, known as the Public Base Exchange, was installed in 1985. To serve the base needs, it required an entire room, about 30,000 miles of ground cable and 40 employees. New technology created a way for the base to manage the phones with fewer resources while also providing greater capability. Now it’s two racks of equipment and the entire system is managed by three people.
Coulter said they started transitioning to VoIP, or voice over internet protocol, nearly 20 years ago. Lack of resources and other obstacles prevented them from completing the project sooner. There are still about 800 phones that have analog lines due to no access to internet, but more than 15,500 base phones are now fully VoIP and all can be managed remotely.
Coulter, along with co-workers Burke Kilburn and Phillip Gardner who helped drive the project to its completion, is excited to see the project end but can’t help but be a little melancholy towards the old system and how it well served the base needs for nearly four decades.
“It’s strange to look back on what it used to take to provide the base phone service,” Coulter said. “Over the years, there has been a steady rotation of military members and civilians maintaining that system. Hundreds of people have had a hand in working on that switch. There were civilians who spent their whole career working on the old telephone switch.”