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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.
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 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.
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.
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)