Offering Managed Wi-Fi is a Win-Win for Consolidated Telcom

Consolidated Telcom is the premier provider of high-speed Internet, telephone, and digital television services in southwestern North Dakota. For more than 50 years Consolidated has delivered state-of-the-art telecommunications services to its customers, driven by both commitment and passion.

One of the early adopters of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technology, Consolidated started building their new network in 2006 and is now a ‘Gig-certified’ service provider, as designated by the NTCA, with nearly 10,000 subscribers.

In the early days of their Internet service offering Consolidated experimented with different ‘consumer brand’ routers that ended up being unreliable and difficult to manage.

To provide subscribers with a better solution, and to improve remote troubleshooting capabilities, Consolidated decided to offer a ‘Managed Wi-Fi’ solution a few years ago. For just $4.99 a month, subscribers get a Calix GigaCenter (capable of delivering up to 1 Gbps) and phone-based technical support (powered Calix Support Cloud).

To date, 28 percent of Consolidated subscribers have opted for the Managed Wi-Fi offering, persuaded by the competitive price (with no up-front costs) and the promise of trouble-free Wi-Fi. Consolidated warranties the GigaCenter (replacing it at no cost on the rare chance that something goes wrong), handles all required software upgrades (to ensure the GigaCenter's optimal performance) and provides remote troubleshooting for most common Internet issues (avoiding the need to visit subscribers’ homes to fix problems).

With a retention rate of 94 percent for Managed Wi-Fi, Consolidated has clearly come up with a winning offer for their subscribers. What’s more, Consolidated has cut their support call times and field technician deployments in half, resulting in significant cost savings. Prior to having this solution, troubleshooting customer issues over the phone was a “guessing game” for customer service representatives.

Hear the full story from the team at Consolidated in this video.