Most products, including video conferencing equipment, include some type of warranty. This warranty may be for 30, 60 or 90 days - in some cases even longer.

Question: Why then, is a service/maintenance plan important?
Answer: Uptime

Service/Maintenance Plans
Uptime, or the expectation of good system operation, is usually presumed when equipment and technology are deployed within an organization. Only when a video conferencing system operates effectively can an organization achieve a return on its equipment investment. But, as described below, there are a number of factors that degrade performance of a conferencing system over time. No organization is immune to these failures. However, mitigation strategies such as a service/maintenance plan with a quality vendor can limit the downtime when failures occur.

TKO Video Communications is in the business of making networks work. To fill the gap between uptime and downtime, TKO offers a range of service plans that are designed from experience to keep your equipment running. Our experience over many years of maintaining high-uptime networks shows that there are four key factors that affect performance - few of which are described in MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) statistics.

Our Service Plans provide same day onsite service, next day onsite service, same week onsite service or remote telephone support. These plans combine both service and maintenance for key equipment at customer facilities. TKO Service Plans are designed to ensure system uptime at a variety of service levels.

Service Plans
Troubleshooting complex electronic equipment, digital telephone lines and IP networks to determine points of failure requires skill, training and experience. Most organizations have few resources to accomplish such tasks in short periods of time. Therefore, transferring this responsibility to an organization that focuses exclusively on servicing and maintaining equipment in a complex environment means more uptime. This is a common mitigation strategy for organizations that want and need uptime at predictable costs.

A service plan is typically a contract for a period of time that is intended to ensure system or network uptime. This includes interoperation of related systems that may affect performance of the equipment specified in a contract. For example, a video conferencing system that connects to a digital telephone line depends on that line for successful connections. While a service plan may only include the video conferencing equipment in its contract, a service plan implicitly includes the requirement that a vendor assist a customer in making the video systems work with the digital telephone line.

Therefore, a service plan offers a degree of cross-platform support when provided by a skilled vendor. This is a key differentiator between a service plan and a maintenance plan or warranty. Further, a service plan includes the fault isolation and testing while many maintenance plans do not.

Maintenance Plans
While many manufacturers of video conferencing equipment tout the mean time between failures of their products in sales literature, most telecommunications professionals understand that failure rates in practice are different than those shown in statistics.

Maintenance plans are often offered by manufacturers to replace parts that fail outside of a warranty period. Manufacturers usually exclude fault isolation and interoperation with other components from maintenance plans. This important exclusion reduces the benefit of a maintenance plan to the customer because, in effect, such maintenance plans offer no assurance of uptime.

There are a number of factors that affect uptime, some of which can be covered by maintenance plans or warranties, but not all. Important considerations for uptime include: quality of original components, daily operating temperatures, movement and user-made adjustments.

About TKO
TKO also provides video conferencing and telecommunications training, satellite broadcasting, streaming video and audio, satellite broadcasting, and both audio and video conferencing services.

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