Delivering reliable healthcare communication with Bandwidth

Delivering reliable healthcare communication with Bandwidth

Inclusa migrated voice and E911 to the cloud with Microsoft Teams and Bandwidth’s Duet for Teams

Elly Yates-Roberts |


Wisconsin-based non-profit Inclusa provides long-term care support and services for over 15,000 elders and adults with disabilities. To do this, its 80 per cent-remote workforce travels to meet with members and ensure they are receiving the care they need.  

When the company discovered that its IT team was addressing support tickets from issues around their voice calling platform instead of focusing on supporting members, it needed to act quickly. With a tight migration schedule, Inclusa decided to migrate telephony to Microsoft Teams, and chose Bandwidth’s Duet for Teams as its Direct Routing and dynamic E911 provider. 

“Working with Bandwidth was a no-brainer because they power Microsoft’s Calling Plans. Duet for Teams gave us all the tools and services we needed to deploy Direct Routing and dynamic E911,” said Josh Jandrain, chief information officer at Inclusa. 

With over a decade of working with Microsoft as a preferred carrier for Teams, Bandwidth’s advanced E911 calling from Teams gave Inclusa a single provider for its telecom services, the reliable voice calling it needed, and a direct line of contact to the carrier. Instead of working with a reselling partner, the company had direct access to Bandwidth’s experts for even better troubleshooting.  

Migrating to Teams with Direct Routing was a significant undertaking with new challenges for Inclusa. Even so, Bandwidth moved Inclusa’s 1,200 users from its previous platform to Teams in four months. 

“The biggest hurdle was coordinating the migration,” said John McDonald, senior infrastructure manager at Inclusa. “Bandwidth helped us migrate on our schedule by setting up session initiation protocol (SIP) channels parallel to our existing ones.” This software-driven migration approach gave Inclusa the power to decide when to transition users to Direct Routing and coordinate rollbacks if things went wrong. 

On top of migrating SIP, Inclusa needed to port its numbers without any disruption. “Bandwidth’s porting team was invaluable,” said Ashley Newby, Inclusa’s system administrator. “If we didn’t have them, we’d still be trying to port our numbers over.” 

Call quality and reliability were two of Inclusa’s biggest reasons for making the move to Microsoft Teams and Bandwidth, and that’s exactly where they saw the biggest improvements – with voice-related tickets dropping by 156 per cent from December 2019 to August 2020. 

“Making the move to Teams and Bandwidth has been a game-changer,” said Newby. “Bringing our calling into Teams makes it the centre of our employees’ workdays with all of their collaboration tools in one place.”  

This article was originally published in the Winter 21/22 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.

Subscribe to the Technology Record newsletter


  • ©2024 Tudor Rose. All Rights Reserved. Technology Record is published by Tudor Rose with the support and guidance of Microsoft.