Adams County approves cloud phone conversion after persistent outages
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Summary
Adams County commissioners approved moving the county’s phone system to a cloud VoIP provider, authorizing a $10,000 one-time build and accepting a recurring service cost estimated at $4,000 per month to replace aging in-house phone infrastructure.
Adams County commissioners voted to proceed with a cloud-based phone-system conversion after staff described recurring outages affecting county administrative lines.
County staff said the county’s in-house phone system, installed around 2000–2001, relies on SIP trunks and cross-county routing that have produced intermittent failures. Staff recommended migrating to a hosted VoIP system that removes the county’s dependence on SIP trunk routing and moves call handling to cloud data centers. Mike (county staff) said the county has few local fiber providers, limiting vendor options, and that staying with the incumbent (Allstar/NEC) would speed migration because the vendor can image current servers into cloud servers.
Staff told commissioners the one-time cost to build the cloud servers is $10,000 and the proposed monthly subscription for Adams County government would be about $4,000; current recurring costs were described as roughly $3,000 per month. The one-time build would move the county off near-obsolete hardware and include new phones as part of the subscription model. Staff emphasized that the county’s dedicated 911 platform is separate and was not affected; they said 911 has had no issues, while admin lines experienced a high rate of missed calls during a recent period.
Commissioners discussed bidding and vendor experience, and staff said other vendors could not quote the work because they lacked experience integrating with the statewide 911 setup (the transcript references an Interdigital/Indigital-era integration). Staff named a contact at the incumbent vendor — Matt Albinsky of Allstar — who previously worked with that statewide integration and is now an owner at Allstar.
A commissioner moved to authorize the upfront cost to begin the cloud migration (clarified in discussion as $10,000) and the motion was seconded and approved by voice vote. The board did not record roll-call tallies in the public discussion; the county will lay out funding and implementation details for the conversion with the vendor and the commissioners.
The meeting record shows the county aims to reduce ongoing outages to administrative lines and modernize aging equipment; staff will return with implementation steps and any further budget impacts for recurring costs.
