Slashdot Mirror
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.
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,
OTOH, students have extremely high data transfer needs
Yeah. They need to scan in their handwritten notes and send them to their professiors sans-compression, which takes all of--no, wait, that's not it.
I mean, yeah, they need to stream WAVs of the lectures from the professors... no, not that.
er, I mean, they need to transfer their written by-hand linux configuration to their CompSci professor--no, wait, that can better be done by handing in a burnt CD, and no one would waste class time on that...
Wait, I got it! Students need to engage in a copyright-free multimedia environment that's littered with, ah, er... entertainment...
VoIP sounds like a better and better use of student bandwidth--especially given that most student projects can be transmitted in a manner of minutes over a dial-up connection. As long as the acutal research projects at the University still have enough, no one should really care.
Especially when you realize that the dollars spent on maintaining the POTS system can be funneled into networking, thus offsetting the cost of the new VoIP system once POTS can be discontinued.
(Oh, and one more thing--if you've ever seen a VoIP system, it needs a real data connection--otherwise it wouldn't be "VoIP".)
Free, with purchase of $150,000 degree program.
Dude, if your girlfriend goes to Dartmouth, consider yourself dumped.
- Class of '94
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories