To Host or Not to Host? That is the question

Network-hosted solutions surely offer a reduction in the energy consumption on the users’ premise, but do they reduce overall consumption or do they just move it from the users premise to the carrier’s premise? I just spoke about this with Dean Parker, president and CEO of Callis Communications . Callis is a hosted telephony and managed IP communications service provider serving small and medium-sized businesses throughout America’s Gulf coast region and has tried to quantify the difference.

Callis estimates the energy consumption of an individual premise-based IPT solution at 20-30 amps. A hosted solution removes this consumption from the customer’s premise to the carrier’s and reduces the customer’s direct consumption due to telephony by about 74%. In comparison, a partitioned hosted solution running within Callis’ network operates at 80 amps, but with a capacity of up to 500 customers. Breakeven comes at about 20 customers.

Additionally, moving the IPT phones and the premise switch from independently powered to powered over ethernet reduces the consumption from 12 amps to 3 amps for a 24-phone Cisco system, taking the switch and the handsets into account.

Combining the energy benefits of a hosted solution and power over ethernet and assuming Callis puts 250 customers on their hosted solution, that represents more than an 80% reduction in overall energy consumption, compared to a premise-based, independently powered solution. Sounds good to me and plenty of justification to consider multi-tenanted hosted solutions.