Michigan Tech charges a monthly fee for all telephone services. For the systems that MTU maintains in house, the fees covers the cost of all the hardware, the software, hardware and software maintenance, telephone trunk costs, cable infrastructure maintenance, and the support service (DNS, DHCP, LDAP) costs of providing the telephone connection. The telephone service rates vary based on the features of the telephone sets. The charge does not cover the cost of the engineering staff that builds, designs, and troubleshoots the telephone system. These costs are covered by the University General Fund.

The service-pricing model is adjusted every year to reflect changes in costs for providing these services. Local and long distance calling is covered through usage charges. These services are provided by outside vendors. Cell phones and pagers are also contracted through outside vendors.

For a general breakdown of the cost components in the current charges for some of the most popular services see our schedule of Telephone Service Fees.

The Telecommunications Engineering Department does not participate in 'pure' research initiatives. Rather, our focus is on investigating new technologies with a goal of finding cost-effective, well-engineered, and highly functional features or services that would benefit the MTU community or improve the performance, security, or reliability of the existing telephone systems.

Areas of current interest include:

• 802.11b Wireless phones will allow campus-wide cordless roaming with a university IP telephone
• Teleworker Phone which allow campus members with a broadband connection at home to have a university IP telephone at home
• Voice recognition and response systems to support administrative functions
• Resilient (failover) systems to improve reliability