Cabinet members at Birmingham City Council are to vote on whether to spend more than £5m renewing the authority's telephone system.
If plans are approved at a cabinet meeting on 16 March, 2009, Birmingham will replace its 10-year-old phone system with 17,000 handsets which use VoIP technology.
The council said the new system would enable staff to log in to telephone handsets at any workstation in any of its offices, using a number allocated to them for receiving and making calls.
Birmingham claims the new Cisco-based system, which would be implemented and supported by BT Global Services under the control of the city's technology provider Service Birmingham, would cut £867,000 from its annual phone bill by 2018.
If the project is approved, work will begin in April with a schedule to complete by December 2010.
Paul Tilsley, deputy leader of Birmingham City Council, whose portfolio covers business transformation, said: "The rapid rate at which technology has evolved means we are now able to introduce a telephony system that is very simple yet massively effective.
"Our existing equipment doesn't let staff carry out their work easily from several locations, which ultimately affects the way they serve citizens and therefore the overall quality of everything we do.
"I am firmly in support of measures such as this which modernise our systems and services: such proposals underline our proven commitment to achieving world-class levels of customer service."
Talkback
With the recent track record of the BCC implementing computer systems, I question the wisdom of this move. The "Voyager" accounting system left 30,000 unpaid invoices to firms supplying the council with goods. Some suppliers threatened the council with bailiffs in order to get money owed. Prior to this was their abortive attempt to install 200 Linux PCs in libraries, all of which were subsequently installed with XP, owing to lack of technical knowledge on the ways of Linux.