TDS Telecom


TDS Telecom is an American telecommunications company with headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Telephone and Data Systems Inc, and is the seventh-largest local exchange carrier in the U.S. TDS Telecom offers telephone, broadband Internet and television services to customers in thirty states and more than 900 rural and suburban communities, though it also serves some urban metropolitan communities. It also sells businesses communications services including VoIP phone service, dedicated broadband Internet and hosted-managed services. With headquarters in Madison, TDS Telecom operates TDS Broadband LLC, and BendBroadband, and TDS Metrocom, LLC. Combined, the company employs nearly 3,300 people. TDS Telecom and parent company TDS Inc. are celebrating 50 years in business in 2019.
On January 1, 2019, the contract between TDS and Nexstar Media, which allowed for TDS to rebroadcast television networks owned by Nexstar, expired, and on February 1, 2019, a new contract was signed. TDS president Jim Butman explained to affected viewers- over 50,000 of them in more than five US states- that the impasse was caused by unreasonable demands from Nexstar, including new rates that were more than double what TDS was previously paying. This was the largest and most protracted dispute in the company's history.
TDS Telecom is a participant in the FCC's Connect America Fund, also known as A-CAM. With this funding TDS is on a ten-year push to bring high speed internet to the furthest reaches of its rural serving areas. Depending on location, the vast majority of TDS customers in eligible rural areas are expected to receive broadband speeds of 25Mbit/s download and 3 Mbit/s upload. The remaining customers are expected to receive broadband speeds at 10/1 and 4/1Mbit/s. In other less rural areas, TDS provides much higher broadband speeds, from 100 Mbit/s to 1Gigabit.
More recently, TDS has been launching new fiber to the home services across Wisconsin and Idaho. New markets in Wisconsin include: Deforest, Windsor, McFarland, Monona Grove, Cottage Grove, Oregon and Merrimac communities, all within Dane County Wisconsin. In Idaho the communities of Coeur d'Alene, Rathdrum, Hayden, Post Falls, all within Kootenai County. These services are offered by TDS through CLEC TDS Metrocom, LLC which is operated by TDS Telecom. Fiber to the home markets are 1 Gigabit speed markets with multiple speed offerings available to customers.

Subsidiaries

Subsidiaries include: