Parliamentary officials have acknowledged recent outages affecting handsets of MPs and peers, and offered reassurances that an upgrade programme will deliver an improved service by the end of the year
MPs have been offered an apology after parliamentary officials acknowledged that the Palace of Westminster’s phone system has suffered weeks of technical issues.
Oversight bodies the House of Commons Commission and the Lords Services Committee – which, in recent weeks, have faced a number of parliamentary questions on the issue – have acknowledged two separate instances in which telephone handsets manufactured by telecoms firm Polycom have stopped working. In between which, the overall performance of the system has been “below standard”, the commission has acknowledged.
The first acknowledged outage came on Friday 12 April, when “the Parliamentary Digital Service (PDS) were made aware of a potential issue affecting Polycom telephone handsets, used with the Microsoft telephone service”, according to Labour peer Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall.
“Following a thorough investigation, a root cause was identified and resolved on Tuesday 16 April 2024,” she added.
Related content
- Parliament seeks £140k digital chief to lead three-year tech strategy
- Parliament to recruit director of information security
- Parliamentary Digital Service seeks new MD to drive digital “step change”
In an update provided last week, Conservative MP Sir Charles Walker – who sits on the House of Commons Commission – revealed that the telephony platform had suffered another outage on Thursday 9 May. This shutdown occurred after “one of two external servers… experienced issues… and any device that attempted to connect to this server was impacted by the outage” .
Those handsets which communicated with the other of the two servers “did not experience an outage”, according to Walker.
“The first report the Digital Service received of handsets not working was at 12.13pm on Thursday 9 May,” he said, in comments published last week. “The team declared a major incident shortly afterwards and service was restored at 9.46am on 10 May.”
The commission representative apologised to his colleagues and offered assurances that an ongoing upgrade project to deliver a new telephony system will improve services.
“I am sorry that… all colleagues continue to experience inconvenience in telephony services which are currently below standard,” he said. “The latest issue with handsets underlines the need for the solution which the Parliamentary Digital Service is implementing later this year. The Voice Programme is upgrading and replacing the existing telephony infrastructure and when implemented, handsets will have 99.999% reliability of connecting.”
PublicTechnology made several attempts to contact Polycom – which is now known simply as Poly, and is owned by HP – but received no response.
Thank you for your help and this post. It’s been great.
벼룩시장 신문그대로보기 (구인구직, 부동산) 벼룩시장 신문그대로보기 바로가기 그리고 지역별 벼룩시장 종이신문그대로보기 방법 (구인구직, 부동산) 알아볼게요. 교차로신문 같이 벼룩시장은 지역별 일자리, 구인구직, 부동산 등 다양한 정보를 제공해요. 교차로신문그대로보기 바로가기는 아래에서 확인하고, 오늘은 벼룩시장 신문그대로보기 바로가기 그리고 사용법 섹스카지노사이트
You could certainly see your expertise in the work you write. The world hopes for more passionate writers like you who aren’t afraid to say how they believe. Always go after your heart.
I was recommended this blog by my cousin. I’m not sure whether this post is written by him as nobody else know such detailed about my problem. You are incredible! Thanks!
This is very interesting, You are a very skilled blogger. I have joined your rss feed and look forward to seeking more of your fantastic post. Also, I’ve shared your website in my social networks!
I am also commenting to make you know what a useful discovery my princess developed using the blog. She came to find lots of details, including what it’s like to have an amazing giving style to have the mediocre ones clearly comprehend some very confusing matters. You really surpassed our expectations. Many thanks for producing these helpful, healthy, informative and in addition cool tips about that topic to Ethel.
I like what you guys are up also. Such clever work and reporting! Keep up the superb works guys I have incorporated you guys to my blogroll. I think it’ll improve the value of my site 🙂
Thanks for sharing your ideas. Something is that scholars have an option between fed student loan as well as a private education loan where it is easier to choose student loan debt consolidation loan than through the federal student loan.