More than six months after their scheduled on-campus installation date, 19 emergency call boxes remain inoperable and may not be in service until June, according to university officials.

According to David Morrell, vice president for university safety, 23 new call boxes were supposed to be installed last September to coincide with the beginning of the new school year and supplement 34 older call boxes. The number of planned new boxes was reduced to 19 this semester after construction at Harbin Field made it impossible to install four of them.

While the older call boxes are still operational, wide areas of campus remain without coverage, including all of Alumni Square, where a shooting occurred earlier this semester.

The call boxes are meant to give students a way to contact the Department of Public Safety during on-campus emergencies. The boxes use a cellular telephone network to connect students to officers in the department’s command center. The university’s facilities department is responsible for ensuring their installation.

SST, a security firm which Georgetown is contracting to physically install the boxes, installed them in the fall, but officials said technical difficulties have prevented them from going online.

Keith Sontag, vice president for products at Electronic icrosystems, a company providing parts for the call boxes, cited numerous reasons for the delay, including problems with the university’s cellular network and a “lack of material supplies.”

But Christian Morjan, Georgetown’s emergency call box project manager, pointed to a defective power supply and conflicts with telephone service providers for the delays.

“Verizon didn’t want to use our system and the cell phone system was not authorized by Verizon so it took a while to find AT&T to be our new provider,” he said.

Morjan said that a new call box in Alumni Square would be operational in the next few days and said that the other boxes would be working by May or June.

While the university’s facilities department attempts to put the boxes into service, some students have expressed concern about the delays.

“I think it is a waste more than anything else. They have been up for awhile and we still can’t use them,” Kelli Untiedt (COL ’07) said. “But considering there wasn’t anything there before, I don’t feel any more unsafe, but I certainly don’t feel safer.”

Morrell said Monday that DPS will be increasing maintenance operations on the older boxes until the new boxes are operational. He also said that DPS will “continue to maintain a safe and secure campus.”

“Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, we have an officer on overtime in Alumni Square, so hopefully the officer makes up for the lack of a call box,” he said. “Having the phones out there gives students more options in the event of an emergency. We look forward to the time when the new ones are fully operational.”