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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.
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.