Madison Heights council hears detailed update on recurring non‑emergency phone outages; council asks for audit and improved public notices

Madison Heights City Council heard a detailed update Monday evening on recurring outages affecting the city's non‑emergency phone lines and directed staff to produce an audit and a cost/implementation report for redundancy and replacement.

The update came from Skynet Innovations, the city's IT contractor, which reported that a router card that carries the city's T1 telephone traffic was in a "constant boot state" and required replacement. Skynet said technicians identified the hardware fault over the weekend and expected a replacement router to arrive the following morning from the manufacturer. Councilors and members of the public also discussed multiple recent outages tied to the city's telephone vendor, TelNet Worldwide.

The discussion matters because residents received repeated Nixle alerts saying non‑emergency lines were down and to call 911 for emergencies, which raised public confusion and concern about how the city communicates and handles failovers for phone services. "We've had a vendor issue, equipment failure, other vendor issues'this equipment is dying before it was supposed to be end of life,"…