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," an iTech committee member said during public comment, urging clearer public notices. Skynet acknowledged the need for better communication and agreed to coordinate with city teams and whoever publishes Nixle alerts.

Councilors pressed for technical and administrative fixes. Skynet said the specific router implicated in the most recent outage dates from 2016 and is scheduled for end of life in 2028, and that the immediate problem required swapping a module/card that would not complete booting. Skynet also said part of the delay in obtaining an RMA was that the support contract for that hardware was not registered under the city's account with the manufacturer; that has now been corrected.

Council members and residents recounted prior incidents: a planned maintenance migration by TelNet that misconfigured an IP pool and produced partial service disruption, and a separate failover event at TelNet's session border controller that produced routing issues to the public Internet. Skynet presented outage timestamps and vendor status‑page notes correlating to reported incidents on May 23, May 28 and the most recent outage.

Council directed several follow‑ups: an audit of all phone‑system routers and modules to verify warranty/support coverage and module status; clearer coordination so that Nixle and city social channels include plain‑language explanations (for example, differentiating "vendor maintenance" from a "router hardware failure"); and a memo to council with costs and implementation schedule for an automatic failover or other redundancy. One councilor recalled that prior iTech discussions estimated a failover line would cost roughly $100 per month and urged that the failover be implemented quickly rather than waiting for a planned system replacement via RFP.

On resilience and dispatch overlap, the council confirmed that 911 emergency lines remained operational during the incidents and that non‑emergency calls were routed to a non‑emergency dispatch line, not to 911 dispatch. Councilors asked staff to confirm whether dispatch capacity was affected and to include that analysis in the forthcoming report.

Councilors emphasized the role of the city's iTech advisory group in identifying best practices. "Had we not had those conversations, my questions would not have been as pointed today," one councilor said, urging swift implementation of failover protections and clearer resident messaging.

The city manager and Skynet committed to returning to council with the audit results, a recommended failover/redundancy approach, associated costs and a timeline for implementation. Council members also requested that staff identify who issues Nixle alerts and ensure those messages clearly name the cause and expected timetable.

Public comment at the meeting included residents who said repeated Nixle messages about outages were confusing and asked why the city could not better distinguish vendor maintenance from internal hardware failures. The iTech committee speaker asked the city to publish root causes and estimated remediation times so residents would understand whether outages were planned vendor maintenance, vendor network failures, or city hardware problems.

Council did not vote on policy at the meeting but approved the direction to compile the audit and cost report and to improve public communications regarding outage cause and duration.