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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.
Here is the no registration NYT link.
Does this apply to dial-a-pr0n lines???
http://news.com.com/2100-12-5080449.html
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. The bandwidth being wasted in VoIP would be much better utilized in data connections. Oh well, I guess the kids can just use modems over the VoIP lines.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
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.
Now, how do I make it work over my cell phone????
Is this setup to connect to a POTS somewhere (to make local and long distance calls) or is it just around the campus?
Pity the guy whose girlfriend goes away to Dartmouth... how many hours will he spend on the phone while she flunks out?
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
This feature of services shows up a lot -- where accounting for / metering the use of something makes up a significant (sometimes the significant) cost of a system. Mass transit is another example. Are there other, more efficient ways to pay for these "too cheap to meter" types of service? Tuition and taxes are one way.
We use VoIP at my work, and it works pretty well. The only problem we have is that sometime the thing just doesn't respond at first. You have to wait and re-try again later.
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,
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.
Some sort of universal agreement will have to be made with ISP's about badwidth usage so that 1) users can use VoIP all they want without bandwidth caps, and 2) Telecom companies have margin for profit.
Perhaps per GB unmetered home access at resonable per GB rates?
Just my $.02
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
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.
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
Oh well, I guess the kids can just use modems over the VoIP lines.
Yep, they can also use rabbit ears to pick up television even though cable is supplied for free.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
So, if I drop $30k/year in schooling costs at Dartmouth, I get free local and long distance calls? Wow. What a deal ;-)
-psy
Free, with purchase of $150,000 degree program.
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
Dude, if your girlfriend goes to Dartmouth, consider yourself dumped.
- Class of '94
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
I remember there used to be alot of free internet phone VOIP services on the internet but they have all died out and are now charging money. But my question is how do you get your internet call over regular phone lines ? How is it done ?
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.
But will it work if there is a power outage and you have to call 911?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
how do you all pronounce VoIP?
cause i say it as one word, kind of like poi (the food) but with a P at the end and a V instead of a P at the front. am i insane for doing this?
course i pronounce gnu as "new" but that's just my own heresy.
Boy, I wish they would put that up in big bold letters right on the front page of the New York Times. When I've suggested this in the past, people have called me all kinds of nasty things.
This is a very interesting point because seems to put the lie to the myth that markets of for-profit enterprises are always efficient and state run enterprises are always inefficient. It's beauracracy that's inefficient. And as this story shows, profit and income itself can actually create inefficient beauracracy. Whether an instituion is privatized and for profit or government operated is not the important point.
A privatized telephone network that is charging most of its fees just to support its billing infrastructure is in no way more efficient than a state run telecom that gives away telecoms service.
Maybe that's why I get my 1.5meg DSL for twenty bucks a month with free local phone service here in Taiwan where our biggest ISP is the government.
Just remember kids, regime change begins at home.
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.
From the NYT article:
When running, the software appears on the screen as a phone with a dial pad. Phone numbers are dialed by clicking the numbers on the key pad.
I doubt many people would be so afraid of keyboards that they'd rather use a mouse! I'm guessing that there'd also be a feature where you type or click on a nickname from your personal address book to make a call. I can see softphone in the future working with fake urls, sort of like those aim:// urls that Aim has.
Here may be the reason why they're doing it:
When I was at Dartmouth (Class of '94), everybody on campus knew that if you did the following:
1. Dial 1 and the area code
2. Click the receiver once
3. Dial the rest of the number
you got free long distance calls. I had a roommate with a girlfriend in Spain, and he figured out how to do it for long distance.
If that still works, I bet nobody at Dartmouth will be using VoIP.
Why does slashcode filter out pound and euro signs, but leave the far more dangerous environment variable tag intact?
But why Dartmouth?
Because Dartmouth students talk a lot.
But seriously...
Dartmouth has quite a tradition of making hi-tek utilities free to their students. In particular:
Back in the bad old days of computing "a computer" was a room full of million-buck grey boxes attended by white-coated priests with PhDs. Any user who was not a member of the priesthood (and some who were) was billed by the second for its use and had to hand in his job at the window as a deck of punched cards, coming back hours later for the printed and maybe punched results.
An invention was made in these days: "Time Sharing". (A computer running a multitasking OS that in turn runs multiple copies of a command language processor, each copy serving a separate, directly-connected user. Think "dialup shell account".)
At first it was limited to fancy directly-connected terminals. Then a relatively cheap multple-teletype interface was invented to use the relatively-cheap TWX machines as terminals. Mechanical Teletype (r) machines, typically running 110 baud 8-bit ASCII. And a few, expensive, "Dataphone" modems could be used to allow remote teletypes to dial in over the TWX network.
But CPU time was still billed by the second, as was connect time on the expensive dialup lines or the less expensive directly-connected terminals.
But then the regents of Dartmouth U got a bee in their bonnet: They were a University. A University was SUPPOSED to be in business to teach students. So this resouce should be available to The Students.
Not just students taking a computer class. Not just grad students on a special, sponsored, project. ALL the students. ALL the time. NO bills.
So Dartmouth put in a bunch of Teletypes, all over campus. And wired them to the Computing Center. And gave EVERY student an account. Even entering freshmen. All of 'em. CPU time, disk storage, the whole shebang.
And because they couldn't afford the manpower to babysit the entire student body they invented a very easy-to-teach interpreted computer language, with a built-in, simple, text-file editor. And wrote manuals and lessons that could be read (and run) on-line.
You've probably heard of it.
It was called BASIC.
A fellow named Gates got his start in the industry by porting it to the Altair - the first home computer.
So it doesn't surprise me AT ALL, now that voice telephony is becoming a "marginal good" (i.e. "too cheap to meter", like electirc elevators without ticket-takers or coin slots) that Dartmouth should be the first institution to make it available to their people without an extra fee.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
unfortunately, SIP isn't the 'preferred' protocol used by Cisco. Cisco mainly uses it's main protocol, called Skinny, aka SCCP . Softphones only works with Skinny. Only high end phones like 7940 or 7960 support SIP, but with a different firmware, not loaded by default. the other phones works only with sccp or h323. A good idea is to have gateways to support all VoIP protocols, so a linux (or mac) user could use software like gnomemeeting for h323 or kphone and linphone for SIP. As far as I know, there isn't a skinny client for linux. Only asterisk (an opensource pbx) seems to have a sccp channel driver, but is in beta stage.
I was there.
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
I just spent a ghetto-riffic weekend in New Hampshire and was amazed to find that I could only get a GSM signal on my ATT Wireless phone within about 2 miles of the Manchester airport.
Fortunately, they do have electricity in New Hampshire, so I was able to do some offline work on my powerbook...
Also happens to be a member of the Avaya developer program, an excellent way to benefit if you want to develop VOIP applications!
--------
Free your mind.
"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...
... to connect an acoustic coupler modem to a VOIP connection for 300 baud nostalgia?
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