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Free VoIP for Dartmouth Students

Posted by michael on from the too-cheap-to-meter dept.

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.

5 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. No Registration Link by davemabe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here is the no registration NYT link.

  2. quality vs latency by jakedata · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  3. Re:stupid by phoxix · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    Not true!

    My friend goes to DM, and she says that few have cell phones at the school. Additionally, if you look at all the major cell phone providers of the USA, none claim to have service in Hanover NH (the school's location). (There is a way you can get service over there via AT&T, but thats another story.)

    So what this school is doing works out well.

    Sunny Dubey

  4. Re:Local and Long Distance? by LostCluster · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yep, the idea is to route the within-campus calls locally, and only give the PTSN the calls that need to head off campus. The advantage of the univerisites doing it themselves (whether it's VoIP or just a PBX) is that the school can route local calls to the local phone monopoly, but can hand long-distance calls directly to the long-distance carrier of choice to bypass the ILEC and save even more.

  5. Re:Dartmouth Phone System by Dolohov · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, I don't think it does. Not from my lab, at least.