1. TDS® managedIP
White Paper
Hosted vs. Premise
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TDS betting on economic value of hosted IP phone service
Madison, Wis. — TDS, a Madison-based tele- installed at the customer’s premises, and Wide Area
communications provider, has introduced a hosted Network connectivity is provided back to TDS, eliminating
Voice over IP (VoIP) service that it believes will remove the need for the customer to purchase equipment.
costs for businesses and be a difference maker in Instead, business customers pay a monthly fee based on
productivity and efficiency gains. One of the key the services they use.
selling points, especially in a struggling economy, is
that businesses can improve their telecommunications Dan O’Connell, a Gartner analyst with expertise in
without any impact on their capital budgets. hosted VoIP services, said the avoidance of capital
expenditures is significant. He said business customers
“As a business strategy, it’s one of our top initiatives as do not have to invest in an IP PBX phone system, which
it relates to our commercial services,” said Ben Goth, can cost anywhere from $800 to $1,000 per user.
manager of commercial product development for TDS.
Nor do business customers have to worry about
Trendy hosts technological obsolescence. With new infrastructure
developed every three to four years, the upgrade cycle
An Internet Protocol solution, the managed service is of IP technology mirrors that of laptop computers, but
designed to provide businesses with a single, converged that’s the host’s concern, O’Connell said.
voice and data communications service.
In addition, business users do not incur support costs,
As the host, TDS manages and upgrades the client’s which can be considerable when you consider that
communications system. The system uses a symmetrical Cisco certified engineers can command upwards of
Internet pipe to deliver voice and data service over a $100,000 a year in salary.
single or multiple T1 lines. Cisco routers and switches are cont. >
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2. TDS® managedIP
White Paper
More business benefits Strategic call?
Another advantage of a hosted system is that it features TDS is looking to capture a large share of a growing
a larger technology platform shared by thousands of market. According to a 2007 Yankee Group study,
users, so costs are quite a bit lower per user—up to 30 72 percent of small businesses and 76 percent of
percent lower. According to O’Connell, that typically medium-sized businesses reported that IP telephony
translates into a $30 to $35 monthly charge, although either is or will be strategic to their business.
some installations come with a monthly charge as low
as $20 per user. Reprinted with permission from Wisconsin Technology Network LLC.
©2008, all rights reserved.
Unlike most VoIP services, which use the pubic Internet to
deliver voice services, the TDS service is delivered over a
private and secure dedicated network that is hosted at
a TDS facility.
The traffic never actually crosses the public Internet,
Goth explained. “There are a couple of other providers
that offer similar services,” he said, “but the way
we deliver and manage it are different than other
providers.”
According to Al Ripp, market manager for TDS, a hosted
VoIP solution also brings disaster recovery benefits in that
the host can remotely control business calls, enabling
disaster response teams to communicate and the
business to continue to track sales calls.
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