By Matt Carroll, Globe Staff
The town of Milton has switched to Internet-based phone technology in Town Hall, joining Hingham as one of the first municipalities in the region to make the leap to a system on the cutting edge of communication technology.
The move was designed to eventually save money, but it also solves a more immediate problem: it had become increasingly difficult to find people who could repair what had become an archaic phone system, said town officials.
Milton Town Administrator David A. Colton said he expected savings of about $300 or $400 a month. The system cost about $40,000 to install.
"We had to get a new phone system because the old system was defunct," said Colton. "It was old and archaic. . . . It was very expensive to call a service guy."
There is an added benefit for residents: The new system allows for quick changes so a town can, for example, set up a flu hot line ''in
20 minutes," said Steve Becker, Hingham's manager of information services. It couldn't be done before.The system is called VoIP, or "voice over Internet protocol." It uses the same underlying technology as the Internet.
With VoIP, the person making the call does not notice anything different. He or she gets the same dial tone and the phone generally looks the same, explained Michael E. Roberts, chairman of Milton's Technology Committee, which helped the town make the switch. But underneath the surface, the technology is very different from old phone lines. The caller's words are digitized and disassembled into packets of information that are sent whizzing across the Internet. At the other end, the packets are reassembled into speech.