YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — The recent problems which caused blocking of incoming calls at Yokota have been almost entirely resolved, an Allied Telesis official said Tuesday evening.
Allied, the provider of phone, Internet and cable television service for the base, switched over their Voice over Internet Protocol phone service to a new carrier, said Bruse Green, Allied’s Yokota business general manager.
The transition from IP Triple to the new carrier was completed at around 8:40 Tuesday morning, he said. The name of the new carrier has not been released.
Green said customers will not have to pay basic phone service fees for September, but will still have to pay for international calls made to numbers outside the United States and Canada during the month.
He added that customers who continue to experience problems should contact Allied’s help desk at 411 and select option 3 to create a trouble ticket.
"There may be some clean-up work to do with individual customers," Green said in an e-mail to customers Tuesday. "However, this is expected to be minor and is the result of a very compressed conversion schedule."
During the phone outage, which began Sept. 18, customers were able to make outbound calls, call other Yokota residents, dial DSN numbers and contact 911. But incoming calls were being blocked and callers would receive an error message.
Green said about 50 customers with the "850" area code were unable to be secured and ported over to the new system. Those individuals have been notified and are selecting new phone numbers, he said.
About five other individual phone numbers were unable to transfer to the new carrier, but Green said he expected those numbers moved to the new carrier within a day or two.
During the outage, callers trying to reach Yokota from the States were having to do so via Allied’s stateside Auto Attendant number at 1-(408) 519-8616. In the e-mail to customers, Green said that the line will be temporarily kept operational.
Over the course of the week, he said, it will transition to a recording that instructs callers to resume dialing their party normally.
