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.
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.
Do students have high data transfer needs or high data transfer wants? There's a big difference between wants and needs
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.
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.
No, a few geeks have high data transfer needs. And if you rule out kazaa and other "pirate networks" (which a campus seems likely to do), what does that leave?
The bandwidth being wasted in VoIP would be much better utilized in data connections.
Like what?
This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days
So what happens when cell phones start coming with a flavor of 802.11 and SIP built in? Oh, then you can roam onto your residential VoIP service (like Vonage or packet8.net without *any* per minute fees. Same thing on the campus LAN. Or Starbucks. Or McDonalds (free minutes with the purchase of a happy meal).
'Tis only a matter of time before we won't need PSTN anymore. This is the first step to that.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
So, if I drop $30k/year in schooling costs at Dartmouth, I get free local and long distance calls? Wow. What a deal ;-)
-psy
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
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.
How do you know that your cell provider isn't already using VoIP to route the calls through its own systems? GSM/CDMA/TDMA are just the protocol from cell phone to tower(s)... and if the call is already in digital form...
So nobody at Dartmouth gets loans or financial aid?
GMail invites for completed freeipods.com of
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.
Well, most students nationwide may have cell phones, but I'd say less than 10 percent of Dartmouth students do. For one thing, the reception is spotty at best, and I think only AT&T serves Hanover. For another, campus e-mail use is phenomenally high -- everyone uses Dartmouth's BlitzMail system, which works kind of like IMAP in that messages are stored centrally and you can get to them from any computer on campus (in fact, public computers are often referred to as "Blitz terminals.") You can even order pizza, Chinese, and all the other delivery options in town online -- so really the only use for a phone at Dartmouth is to call businesses (see who sells CO2 for your kegerator) or to call home. Dartmouth just made calling home free, which you have to admit is pretty nice.
As an aside, I disagree strongly that it is a waste of resources to have voice capabilities in dorms. In most cases, the wiring is already there, so it's a sunk cost -- might as well use it. When you're building new dorms, the marginal cost of adding phone wiring is minimal, so you might as well do it. Additionally, the capabilities have to be there for emergency services. Finally, there are plenty of people out there (myself included) who just don't have 500 bucks a year to spend on a cellular calling plan. All in all, it's definitely not a waste to keep phones in the dorms.
(Dartmouth '03, BTW, so I know what I'm talking about wrt campus phone use)
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.
That's basically all they do for any major customer. With a PBX system they just provide the T-1 circuit and setup the billing codes, everything else is automated. Basically you can get voice grade SLA's on your data lines, hell our SLA's were better than regulated voice line standards, we always had a telecom engineer out the same day, regulation is 2 days.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Technically the T1 you are talking about is a voice circuit. I guess it was a mistake for me to reference POTS instead of voice circuits in my original post, but here's my point: At my company we do it both ways. We have a PRI for voice and a separate Internet feed from Qwest via a T1 point to point link though Verizon. I have some telecommuters on DSL endpoints with Nortel VoIP phones hooked into our network though IPSec tunnels. If those telecommuters are getting crappy voice service, who are they going to call? Me. If I call Verizon and tell them, "hey, my VoIP phones are cutting out, what's the deal?", they will first laugh at me, and then proceed to tell me that the T1 line to Qwest is in perfect condition and it's not their problem.
If there's a problem with the PRI on the other hand, it's all about them getting it fixed. Now. Whether the problem is with the PRI itself or with the voice circuits. And they have to jump though hoops until the problem is fixed.
So you see, my point is that VoIP takes a load of responsibility off the telecom's shoulders. All they have to worry about is the phyical connection. Everything else? Your problem.
-R
"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...
"What will the success/failure of VoIP on this scale have on telecom?"
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.
They make a LOT more money selling a retail toll-call voice connection to a consumer than they do from selling the equivalent amount of bandwidth wholesale to an ISP or backbone provider.
A LOT.
Like several orders of magnitude.
Think about it: One phone call, WITHOUT compression, is 64k bps. Your 1.5 Mbps download DSL link is the equivalent of one side of 24 simultaneous calls to anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Say you've only got 256k uplink: That's still 4 calls 24/7. Imagine what you'd be paying for THAT if it were retail long distance. What are you paying - retail - for your DSL? (And the tellcos are selling that wholesale to your ISP.)
Assume it's only three orders of magnitude: That turns every billion dollars of revenue into a million. Yet it doesn't decrease their costs of operation enough to mention.
Add in the fact that their profit is the DIFFERENCE between cost and revenue, and they aren't running anywhere near 10,000% return on investment, and you can see what a disaster it is for the telcoms.
Then add in the fact that they haven't amortized (paid off) their current infrastructure - which had maybe a 30-year ammortization schedule - and you can see that they're caught between a rock and a hard place. Drop the prices, they can't pay the interest on their bonds. Bankruptcy.
That is why the telecoms cut WAY back on buying new equipment for voice telephony - strangling or bankrupting a bunch of suppliers in the "telecom crash" - which is still underweigh. And why they're frantically trying to convert their networks to VoIP, before the upstarts eat them alive.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
One of the reasons they are doing this, and which I think justifies the entire thing on its own, is that they want to study the social and infrastructural impacts of a widescale wifi/voip deployment. That kind of knowledge is going to be useful for all of us, either directly or through the next-generation networks that build on it.
You're confusing yourself with the 99% of society who do not have "extremely high data transfer needs" and are much happier on the phone than on Slashdot.
Actually I think you're just jealous.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS