by CASSIE SLANA
Senior Writer

(WARRENSBURG, Mo., digitalBURG) — Warrensburg and the University of Central Missouri campus are included with hundreds of cities across the United States that lost AT&T service in early April, 2017.

Mel Gross, manager of the UCM technology support center, said that while station to station dialing on campus remained unaffected, service was patchy when it came to calling a campus number from an off-campus number and vice versa.

Mark Schlueter, assistant director of UCM network services, said, “That was a national outage for AT&T across the entire United States, so the severity of that was more severe than not, with a lot of customers impacted.”

UCM has taken the outages into account with the new phone service and further steps to combat them when they do happen with basic service functions.

“If we were to lose connectivity to AT&T, we have some devices on campus that will sustain on-campus calling station to station, device to device and then allow those devices to also call off campus for off-campus calling and emergency type services,” Schlueter said. “A basic level of functionality would still exist.”

Regarding a loss of commercial electricity, including desktop computers, telephones and more, Schlueter said incidents would be handled in a, item by item basis, but options remain for students to utilize for communication purposes.

“There would still be the texting service that’s available and a number of other services, communication wise, that the university has utilized successfully during commercial electrical outages in the past,” Schlueter said.

Schlueter said that in the past there have been back-up generators used but only some buildings have them and the new system relies heavily on other services including texting and email.

“Thankfully outages are very rare, and when they do happen in the middle of the night, we are waking people up to come and tend to that,” Schlueter said. “So, I would say, we will continue to do what we’ve been doing to make sure that we keep everything up to the best of our ability.”