Troubled municipal radio system suffers another outage

There has been another bungle with the city’s new communications system, with several departments, including transit, losing radio service for more than three hours Friday.

Denis Crete, system manager of the city’s corporate radio system, confirmed the radio service was down between 8:45 a.m. and 12:15 p.m., and full service wasn’t completely restored until 1:32 p.m.

The departments affected by the radio outage were transit, the 311 centre, public works, Ottawa Public Health and environmental services.

When transit radios go down, the standard procedure involves using cellphones to communicate, as workers did on New Year’s Eve when the “leap second” knocked out the radio system for about an hour.

The city is in between radio networks but it’s having a tough time implementing a new Bell-supplied radio system for 5,900 users across all departments, while also maintaining an outgoing radio system past its end-of-life age.

Ottawa police and fire services will be switched over to the new system, but not until it’s stable. The city has pushed back the police and fire implementation to the third quarter of this year, instead of going live this spring. Users at the Ottawa International Airport are also expected to be transitioned to the new system later this year.

The new radio system was supposed to be running across all departments by July 2015.

The city is paying $5.5 million annually to Bell for the system in a council-approved 10-year contract. The city has also spent $10 million for new radio equipment.

The city and Bell have been talking about the company’s responsibilities under the contract.