No. Even though the departments do not directly incur monthly charges for GEF and Research funded basic voice and data services, the costs are expected to be covered by the amount of GEF budget that was reverted. Therefore it is extremely important that individual departments and ITS work together to make sure only needed services are being requested and delivered.

• No. You still need to follow the University accounting rules and allocate voice and data expenses to the proper Funds. You may be asked for written verification that a new service is properly allocated to a GEF or Research Fund.
  • However, if you do want to switch some telephone lines or data ports to GEF funded, you can do this by reverting the additional budgets.

• Hopefully, you understand how unused connections can impact the GEF distribution and you want to be a good University citizen, so you only have the services that you need. Departments and ITS must continue to work together to keep costs down for the whole campus. Unused voice or data connections add unnecessary expenses.
• It is also much less expensive to Move a service to a new location than to Add a new one, $75 versus $150 for a phone or $200 for data. So, if you are changing locations, you will save $125 per data connection or $75 per voice connection by moving the service to your new location rather than installing a new one.
• ITS will also periodically perform audits of services and may disconnect unused ports. This most often happens when new services are requested but the network equipment serving that area does not have the capacity to fulfill the request. It does not make good operational or economic sense to install more capacity if there are unused ports. In all cases, customers are notified of the ports that are identified for possible reclamation and have the chance to identify those that are need to be active, but are little used, like conference rooms or offices that are in transition.

• ITS worked on an Organizational Level with the Deans, Organizational Leaders and Business Officers to take the following steps:
  1. Calculated total GEF voice charges by Org
  2. Used last year’s long distance data to estimate how much this year’s long distance charges would be at 5 cents per minute
  3. Left the projected long distance charges in the unit budget
  4. The remainder was the reverted budget amount

If the changes can be completed without traveling to a customer site, the price is generally $50. If the change requires a technician to go on-site, the price is $75. This helps to offset the increased expense of dispatching a technician.

For general telephone questions you can contact 335-2945, for Telephone Repairs contact 335-2949 or its-itconnect@uiowa.edu