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Free VoIP for Dartmouth Students
dtfusion writes "After upgrading their network infrastructure and doing some testing over the summer, Dartmouth is making free voice over IP available to incoming freshman. It turns out it was costing them more to bill the students for local and long distance than for the calls themselves. What will the success/failure of VoIP on this scale have on telecom?" There's an older story and a newer story from the Dartmouth public affairs office; that second one probably spurred the NYT article. The sysadmin-types are planning to study usage during the rollout.
Here is the no registration NYT link.
Does this apply to dial-a-pr0n lines???
http://news.com.com/2100-12-5080449.html
This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days, so having any sort of voice capabilities in dorms is a waste of resources. OTOH, students have extremely high data transfer needs. The bandwidth being wasted in VoIP would be much better utilized in data connections. Oh well, I guess the kids can just use modems over the VoIP lines.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
Voiceover Intellectual Property?
What, is McBride being dubbed in German now?
If someone makes a large number of long distance calls, it is more sensible to use Voice over IP anyway rather than use a regular phone. There are many reasonably priced Voice over IP services out there for people in colleges that don't provide this.
Now, how do I make it work over my cell phone????
Is this setup to connect to a POTS somewhere (to make local and long distance calls) or is it just around the campus?
Pity the guy whose girlfriend goes away to Dartmouth... how many hours will he spend on the phone while she flunks out?
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
This feature of services shows up a lot -- where accounting for / metering the use of something makes up a significant (sometimes the significant) cost of a system. Mass transit is another example. Are there other, more efficient ways to pay for these "too cheap to meter" types of service? Tuition and taxes are one way.
We use VoIP at my work, and it works pretty well. The only problem we have is that sometime the thing just doesn't respond at first. You have to wait and re-try again later.
Get all your Dartmouth friends to call the Help Desk on their leet VoIP phones and yell "PING" repeatedly when the person answers.
Trolling is a art,
Because Dartmouth students talk a lot.
Ba-dam PISSHHH! Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Um, doesn't the telecom industry own much of the data backbone as well? When they quit making money from local service, they start making money on bandwidth.
Some sort of universal agreement will have to be made with ISP's about badwidth usage so that 1) users can use VoIP all they want without bandwidth caps, and 2) Telecom companies have margin for profit.
Perhaps per GB unmetered home access at resonable per GB rates?
Just my $.02
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
"...freshmen can download free software that allows their Windows computers to function as telephones..." Jeez. That's a real slap in the face to a lot of mac, linux, etc. users out there. Actually, I'm surprised that similar software isn't out for linux, too. Or maybe it is and the article doesn't mention it. Either way, was inserting the "W" word in there really neccessary?
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
I couldn't find this info anywhere on the link from the college article, but does anyone know how much the hardware for these free calls costs? If it is much more than a typical phone, considering the low cost of long distance / wireless, it could very well never pay off to use the service.
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
In a college campus situation, a lot of calls are within the campus exchange itself where there's no need for routing it through the PTSN, and plenty of bandwidth available between the buildings.
When it comes off-campus calls, a lot of those calls are long distance, which can head out over the university's huge bandwidth pipe to the Internet (or maybe even Internet2 or another academic-only network) to a more appropriate entry point into the PTSN to save long distance charges.
The remainder are local calls which aren't too expensive anyway.
So, it makes perfect since for schools to boot out the local phone monopoly and provide their own phone service to students. The only downside I see is the high costs of a VoIP phone, but once those start getting mass produced that should drop too.
I played quite a bit with H.323 voip via 802.11b, and found that as the article states, it is possible to enjoy quality equal to or superior to a standard telephone call. I was using IP phones rather than the softphone package the students were given.
The price for quality is latency. You need a fairly large buffer to compensate for wireless' retries. I was able to get it to work pretty well, but if the buffer was too large, it was reminiscent of a cell phone call with just enough delay to make you talk all over the other person.
I settled on a 16 kb/s codec and a 250 ms buffer as a good balance between performance and sound quality, and I never had complaints on that front.
-j
Oh well, I guess the kids can just use modems over the VoIP lines.
Yep, they can also use rabbit ears to pick up television even though cable is supplied for free.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
I don't think anyone I know in our dorms has even bothered getting phone service hooked up - cellular is the way of the future...
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Now there's a great idea! Seriously. When I first started out at college, I budgeted around $30/mth for myself in phone bills. That's right, $30/mth because I am from Ohio, and was attending school in Florida. The long distance charges calling a few friends cross-country and my family cross-country can add up QUICK! Especially for a freshman that's in a whole new environment. (Trust me, living amongst so many retiree's is like living amongst a bunch of retarded space-aliens, not that all old people act like retards, but a lot do tend to be rather crusty)
Seriously, for a freshman to not have to pay the phone bill each month, it's DEFINITELY worth it to stay on campus! That's about 6 extra Papa-John's pizza's per month!
So, if I drop $30k/year in schooling costs at Dartmouth, I get free local and long distance calls? Wow. What a deal ;-)
-psy
Free, with purchase of $150,000 degree program.
I don't want to get into the argument about whether these perceived 'needs' this is based upon are legal or not, but there are also other perspectives. This is surely a reasonable test of VoIP, which should be welcomed as a step forward along this technical path. Not only that, but sooner or later (I'll leave others to debate which this will be) the majority of us may very well have a need for concurrent high data transfer and VoIP capabilities. Would you prefer this technology was further refined in a suitable environment (due to technical, physical, and informational resources) such as this, or not at all?
The Mothership
Dude, if your girlfriend goes to Dartmouth, consider yourself dumped.
- Class of '94
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
I remember there used to be alot of free internet phone VOIP services on the internet but they have all died out and are now charging money. But my question is how do you get your internet call over regular phone lines ? How is it done ?
Learn to FUCKING talk.
Olin College has done a similar deal with their students for the past year, but it ended up turning out abysmally. All phones on campus are VoIP phones, but the cost of the hardware is prohibitively expensive. Using the computer software would be great, except for the fact that here, laptops are standard, meaning they run out of batteries, move from place to place, and the like, making it not an expecially palatable idea. In practice students have overwhelmingly given up land-lines for cell phones with no long-distance, no roaming, satisfying all phone needs.
But will it work if there is a power outage and you have to call 911?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I think that setting up VoIP in lieu of a traditional campus-based PSTN is genius. You consolidate your switching structure (everything ends up as ethernet packets), you enable cheap long-distance (these are college students, they're going to call home), and extremely scalable local communications (build a new dorm, put in cat-5 and hook them up to the campus backbone.)
The only problems I see are possible quality of service issues if the network is saturated with traffic... like that generated from filesharing.
how do you all pronounce VoIP?
cause i say it as one word, kind of like poi (the food) but with a P at the end and a V instead of a P at the front. am i insane for doing this?
course i pronounce gnu as "new" but that's just my own heresy.
Boy, I wish they would put that up in big bold letters right on the front page of the New York Times. When I've suggested this in the past, people have called me all kinds of nasty things.
This is a very interesting point because seems to put the lie to the myth that markets of for-profit enterprises are always efficient and state run enterprises are always inefficient. It's beauracracy that's inefficient. And as this story shows, profit and income itself can actually create inefficient beauracracy. Whether an instituion is privatized and for profit or government operated is not the important point.
A privatized telephone network that is charging most of its fees just to support its billing infrastructure is in no way more efficient than a state run telecom that gives away telecoms service.
Maybe that's why I get my 1.5meg DSL for twenty bucks a month with free local phone service here in Taiwan where our biggest ISP is the government.
Just remember kids, regime change begins at home.
this is absurd... any voip solution needs to NOT be based on a computer with a headset, and needs to be based on a standalone handset solution as the PRIMARY means, perhaps with the computer as an option...
I can't reboot or turn off my computer while talking on the phone? what if i'm calling for tech support (I know, I know).
What if there's a blackout? Better be all UPS'd out.
I can understand the whole billing probelem tho... when I went to college they farmed out the billing and plenty of students just didn't receive bills from this ultra-shady 3rd party billing company.
Free as in buried in the dorm fees, which go up year by year.
It's neat and all, but dorm fees are so fucking high you'd expect a butler to serve you filet mignon on a silver platter every night.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
oh, i think boromir may have fancied himself the future king of gondor more than once...
Umm...WWJD?
I've always been fascinated by the VoIP vs. POTS argument. I doubt the telecoms will lose money in the switch...After all, who owns all of the underground cable? If everything switches to VoIP, the only difference is that more data capacity will be needed as opposed to voice capacity. Not only that, VoIP is the Wild West compared to POTS, which is regulated to hell and back. In a VoIP house, the telecoms kick back, take their money, and only worry about the customers having a solid data connection from the main office to whatever endpoint the connection is going to. After that, quality of service issues are strictly in the hands of the customer.
This makes it even easier for the telecoms to tell you "it's not our problem". If I were them, I'd be pretty happy about the popularization of VoIP.
-R
So... if you get a telemarketer call over a VoIP network, does it fall under the control of anti-spam legislation?
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
From the NYT article:
When running, the software appears on the screen as a phone with a dial pad. Phone numbers are dialed by clicking the numbers on the key pad.
I doubt many people would be so afraid of keyboards that they'd rather use a mouse! I'm guessing that there'd also be a feature where you type or click on a nickname from your personal address book to make a call. I can see softphone in the future working with fake urls, sort of like those aim:// urls that Aim has.
Dude, if your girlfriend goes to Dartmouth, consider yourself dumped.
If your girlfriend goes to Dartmouth, chances are excellent that she wasn't exactly a severe hottie to begin with. Raise your standards and consider yourself lucky.
--Class of '03
Here may be the reason why they're doing it:
When I was at Dartmouth (Class of '94), everybody on campus knew that if you did the following:
1. Dial 1 and the area code
2. Click the receiver once
3. Dial the rest of the number
you got free long distance calls. I had a roommate with a girlfriend in Spain, and he figured out how to do it for long distance.
If that still works, I bet nobody at Dartmouth will be using VoIP.
Why does slashcode filter out pound and euro signs, but leave the far more dangerous environment variable tag intact?
But why Dartmouth?
Because Dartmouth students talk a lot.
But seriously...
Dartmouth has quite a tradition of making hi-tek utilities free to their students. In particular:
Back in the bad old days of computing "a computer" was a room full of million-buck grey boxes attended by white-coated priests with PhDs. Any user who was not a member of the priesthood (and some who were) was billed by the second for its use and had to hand in his job at the window as a deck of punched cards, coming back hours later for the printed and maybe punched results.
An invention was made in these days: "Time Sharing". (A computer running a multitasking OS that in turn runs multiple copies of a command language processor, each copy serving a separate, directly-connected user. Think "dialup shell account".)
At first it was limited to fancy directly-connected terminals. Then a relatively cheap multple-teletype interface was invented to use the relatively-cheap TWX machines as terminals. Mechanical Teletype (r) machines, typically running 110 baud 8-bit ASCII. And a few, expensive, "Dataphone" modems could be used to allow remote teletypes to dial in over the TWX network.
But CPU time was still billed by the second, as was connect time on the expensive dialup lines or the less expensive directly-connected terminals.
But then the regents of Dartmouth U got a bee in their bonnet: They were a University. A University was SUPPOSED to be in business to teach students. So this resouce should be available to The Students.
Not just students taking a computer class. Not just grad students on a special, sponsored, project. ALL the students. ALL the time. NO bills.
So Dartmouth put in a bunch of Teletypes, all over campus. And wired them to the Computing Center. And gave EVERY student an account. Even entering freshmen. All of 'em. CPU time, disk storage, the whole shebang.
And because they couldn't afford the manpower to babysit the entire student body they invented a very easy-to-teach interpreted computer language, with a built-in, simple, text-file editor. And wrote manuals and lessons that could be read (and run) on-line.
You've probably heard of it.
It was called BASIC.
A fellow named Gates got his start in the industry by porting it to the Altair - the first home computer.
So it doesn't surprise me AT ALL, now that voice telephony is becoming a "marginal good" (i.e. "too cheap to meter", like electirc elevators without ticket-takers or coin slots) that Dartmouth should be the first institution to make it available to their people without an extra fee.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Games need bandwidth, not global bandwidth. This bandwidth can be provided by a LAN with 100BASE-TX switches to a gigabit backbone. Besides, some university IT departments (such as Rose-Hulman's) already have AUPs that ban connecting to an off-campus game server or opening a game server to off-campus connections without express written consent, granted only in cases where students are developing the game for a grade.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Kemenywas a Hungarian by birth, mathematician and co-inventor (with Thomas Kurz) of the BASIC language.
dial in over the TWX network.
Wasn't TWX called AOL until a few days ago? Was the TWX network a remote ancestor of Q-Link, the service that became America Online?
Will I retire or break 10K?
-
There is a need to regulate the advertisers who use spam, as
well as the actual spammers, because the actual spammers can be
difficult to track down due to some return addresses that show up on
the display as "unknown" and many others being obvious fakes and they
are often located offshore.
Courts will have to untangle who the "advertiser" is in ambiguous cases. Sometimes it's unambiguous (Sony Style, Target).The true beneficiaries of spam are the advertisers who benefit from the marketing derived from the advertisements.
A more questionable case would be a multibillion dollar suit against Pfizer (makers of Viagra). Pfitzer might lose such a suit, too. All it takes is someone who can prove that a Pfizer sales rep provided a Viagra spammer with some promotional consideration. Clearly, Pfizer profits from Viagra spam. Now it's time for them to pay. Start looking for that smoking gun now.
Gnu is pronounced new. It's an animal.
GNU != Gnu. Gnu, the animal, may be "NOO", but GNU, the operating system, is pronounced "g'NOO".
Was it that hard?
SBC has been calling small business customers telling them that they will match any rates offerred by Vonage http://www.vonage.com/, one of the leading IP phone providers
It's a Clarisys USB phone. They work nicely with the Cisco softphone. http://www.clarisys.net/
I just spent a ghetto-riffic weekend in New Hampshire and was amazed to find that I could only get a GSM signal on my ATT Wireless phone within about 2 miles of the Manchester airport.
Fortunately, they do have electricity in New Hampshire, so I was able to do some offline work on my powerbook...
discarding the fact that the NYT published this article. FUCK the NYT. New Yarc is not the center of the universe.
Also happens to be a member of the Avaya developer program, an excellent way to benefit if you want to develop VOIP applications!
--------
Free your mind.
So it doesn't surprise me AT ALL, now that voice telephony is becoming a "marginal good" (i.e. "too cheap to meter", like electirc elevators without ticket-takers or coin slots) that Dartmouth should be the first institution to make it available to their people without an extra fee.
Yeah, pay $36,000 a year and we'll let you talk on the phone for free.
the phone in my dorm room has said 3com on it for the past 2 years, my little 10k/yr school is on the cutting edge.
"Separation of concerns" should sink VoIP.
We have a nice VoIP system in the CS building at Stanford. When routers dump, people now lose the ability to work on their machines and to use the phones. It's an amazing thing to see productivity drop off so dramatically all at once. It used to be that when the power went out, for instance, and it was still light outside, people just shifted gears. They caught up on phone calls, returned voicemails, etc. Now, the world shuts down.
VoIP would be a great idea if it *didn't* utilize the same networks and have the same power requirements of those same networks. I rue the day I lost my hard PSTN land line. (And I love my cell phone... I'm not speaking as a luddite.)
Putting all your eggs in one basket may be cheaper, and it may be more efficient for a while, but it sure does suck to lose all services to the next blaster worm to come along...
Dartmouth ROCKS!!!
The only downside I see is the high costs of a VoIP phone, but once those start getting mass produced that should drop too.
They're not using standalone VoIP phones. They're using a VoIP softphone application on the students' (already required) PCs, with a headset plugged into the sound card.
Buy the "standard" headset for $50 at the campus store or use any old PC headset you've got kicking around for zero added hardware/software cost.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... to connect an acoustic coupler modem to a VOIP connection for 300 baud nostalgia?
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
+1, Funny.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
this is obviously another location where it costs more money for T-Mobile to meter the usage than it does for each Starbucks to install a $50/month DSL connection and a $300 (Cisco, strong and stable, not a POS linksys) base station.
i would spend money hand over fist if i could go to starbucks and surf. in fact, Starbucks LOSES money from me because i have broadband at home - and don't want to pay for it twice. I often find myself too interested in doing something online than to go up the street and keep on working on it there - which would be no problem at all.
well, the only problem for Starbucks is that i'm not there buying $.10 of coffee for $4
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I'll never subscribe to NYT. I could handle ads, popups, whatever. But this is the 500th. time they get me in their "free reg" trap. What a bunch of lousy losers! I hope they make lots and lots of money so as not to need mine, because they shall not have it.
And, no, I won't use any subterfuges to read the articles without registering. If they want to force me to register, they'll discover they cannot.
And this is good for you, too, Eugenia. Go tell your husband to behave, ok?
Who modded this down? At the least it deserved it's original 1. I found it usefull.
But the thing is, everyone here carries laptops anyway. We check our email fanatically from everywhere on campus, and often during class. (Unless my advisor's reading this, in which case I don't)
The rebooting question is tough; I haven't seen that yet. But then, cell phone reception up here is pretty good these days, and there are still POTS phones all over the place for those occasions -- which answers your blackout question too. Of course, this means that we can't go entirely over to VoIP, but I don't think that's really being planned anyway.
They've been raising tuition ever since I got here three years ago they might as well give us something for free. They have enough money saved up that they don't even need to charge us for tuition but they do anyhow. Oh, and they're going to start charging for printing: http://www.dartmouth.edu/comp/news/stories_2003/gr eenprint_quotas.html
I have more use for free printing than free VoIP or long distance since I've already paid for a freaking phone card and almost everyone else has a cell phone, so frankly, I'm not amused.
-Disgruntled Dartmouth Senior
Cmon. Walmart has been using this for store to store calls for years. From any stor in the world you can call any other walmart or sams club store.
"We can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind. Cause your friends don't dance and if they don't dance.
Except that if you've noticed, viagara is a buzzword more than a product name on the internet... with many companies peddling "herbal viagara" or "safe healthy viagara alternative" etc etc. Basically it's easier to substitute viagara with pill-to-make-yer-weenie-go-boing or an obscure scientific term (although erection enhancer isn't too bad), but that doesn't mean many of these spammers are selling the Pfizer pill (or for that matter, that the products being sold even work, which many don't overly well)
Sigh, I go to Dartmouth and I just found out about this off Slashdot.
:-)
Something is very wrong about that
I would hope that at least one company has enough of a clue to put POTS service on one of the unused pairs, much like the way power over Ethernet works. If the network goes down or the power goes out, then your normally-VoIP phone turns into a POTS device.
Obviously this doesn't work for the situation in the story where people are using real computers, but consider the case where people have these newfangled phones on their desks. They shouldn't be cut off from emergency services just because the local power is out.
This will all have to be figured out and nailed down before the local loop ever budges from POTS.
You insensitive clod! My ears, they bleed!
What if she goes to RPI?
Wow. Just found this post while doing metamod... I don't wanna metamod it as 'Troll,' but there's no 'Incoherent' option. Pity, that.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?