When we talk to most asset managers in real estate about telecom, they’ll point to their monthly bill. A line item. A known cost. Not much to do about it. Done.
Except it isn’t.
The true cost of telecom hides in plain sight. And like all hidden costs, it quietly compounds until it eats away at productivity, profit, and peace of mind.
1. Legacy Accounts That Never Die
Most owners/managers inherit all sorts of accounts they didn’t set up. Services that were supposed to be cancelled but never were. Old numbers that still route somewhere, still rack up charges.
The story is always the same: “It wasn’t worth the hassle to unwind it.” So it stays. Month after month. Year after year.
2. Old Tech That Won’t Let Go
You’ll find 2005 pricing still in effect, showing up on a bill for old tech. A fax line bundled with an old TV package. Hardware sitting in a closet, unused but still being billed.
It lingers because no one’s job is to clean it up. And so it quietly collects a tax on the business.
3. Downtime/Lost Time Costs More Than You Think
When the internet goes down, the elevator lines stop working, the office needs to add one more line, the gate receiver has an issue, the first thing you notice is the problem. But the real cost is productivity lost in managing and fixing it.
Every hour your team spends chasing vendors (if they even know exactly which of the five they have to call…), troubleshooting themselves, or waiting on hold with carriers is an hour they aren’t doing the work that actually matters.
I’ve seen teams spend 20–30% of their time managing what should have been a managed service. Following up with vendors. Testing things. Scheduling & rescheduling repairs. Resetting devices.
It’s a time sink. And like all time sinks, it feels small in the moment but adds up to something massive.
The Opportunity Cost
Here’s a better story: One company moved their telecom to the cloud and got back 20% of their time.
That’s not just hours recovered—it’s momentum regained. Suddenly, instead of chasing down why a phone line won’t ring, their team was building internal apps, innovating, staying ahead in a faster, more competitive world.
It wasn’t about saving money on the bill. It was about saving time, attention, and energy—the things that actually compound into growth.
The lesson? The bill you see each month is just the tip of the iceberg. The hidden costs—legacy accounts, old tech, downtime & “management”—are the real threat.
And the companies that win are the ones who stop treating things like telecom as a nuisance cost to be minimized… and start treating it as a strategic lever to be optimized.
Because the real expense isn’t what you’re paying. It’s what you’re missing.
Next week we’ll give you the formula we use internally to evaluate the cost of hidden costs. This is one of the formulas we use to analyze where customers can find the most impact from our TeleCloud Multi-site services. But you can use it for anything where you need to determine the ROI of lost productivity.
