The Los Angeles Police Department is looking to replace its aging phone system.
The Foothill, Devonshire, Van Nuys and Granada Hills police stations are among those to receive the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) upgrades, with Van Nuys being the first.
Up to $648,000 has been set aside for the system’s modernization and employee training on the system. The four stations house more than 1,000 phones.
The city has more than 500 facilities, including nine more stations that use the legacy phone system, Los Angeles’ CIO Ted Ross wrote in a report to the City Council.
The report included a plan to complete the system upgrade in the first four stations by June 2018, beginning as soon as July.
The company that maintains the city’s phone system will discontinue service for all of Los Angeles’ antiquated systems by 2020.
The upgrades follow a series of non-emergency outages last month that resulted in rerouting of calls to the city’s 311 system. The city has experienced a 12 percent increase of failures in the non-emergency system over the last year.
