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MI E=111(-111101f=� 1113irs-am B achgrou nd The City's current telephone and voicemail systems are approximately eight years old and are at the end of their useful lives. At the direction of the City Council, City staff participated in a joint study with the cities of 1 New Brighton and Shoreview and the North Suburban Communications Commission of phone systems. The Study was conducted by Haigh, Todd & dissociates (HTA) a communications consulting firm. After a month long study, HTA concluded that each jurisdiction install and maintain its own phone system with a common network architecture. This report was presented to the Roseville City Council on April 28, 2003. The Council directed City staff` to proceed with an Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony system. IF telephony is a digital -based system that runs over existing data networks. with IP telephony, voice and data become integrated sharing capabilities and costs. The advantages of the Ili telephony system include: As part of the switch over to IP telephony, staff` was directed to switch the City's phone extensions to a common prefix. The previous system had multiple prefixes including different prefixes within the same department. Also numbers within departments were not arrays assigned sequentially. The result was that it could be difficult for the public and employees to communicate with staff. Network Manager Terre Heiser reserved a bank of numbers with the 792 prefix in the 7xxx range. There will be two maim numbers-, 792 -7000 and 792 -ROSE (7673). The new numbers will be put in use on Friday, October 3. The existing numbers will remain active for approximately a year while the City communicates to the public about the change and the public becomes comfortable using the new phone numbers.' This time period is based on the experiences of other cites that have undergone phone number changes in the past few years. Staff contacted other cities about their phone number changes. Gleaning from the other cities corn plans, Roseville staff has developed the following strategies to communicate the phone number changes.