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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.
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.
Get all your Dartmouth friends to call the Help Desk on their leet VoIP phones and yell "PING" repeatedly when the person answers.
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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
OTOH, students have extremely high data transfer needs
Yeah. They need to scan in their handwritten notes and send them to their professiors sans-compression, which takes all of--no, wait, that's not it.
I mean, yeah, they need to stream WAVs of the lectures from the professors... no, not that.
er, I mean, they need to transfer their written by-hand linux configuration to their CompSci professor--no, wait, that can better be done by handing in a burnt CD, and no one would waste class time on that...
Wait, I got it! Students need to engage in a copyright-free multimedia environment that's littered with, ah, er... entertainment...
VoIP sounds like a better and better use of student bandwidth--especially given that most student projects can be transmitted in a manner of minutes over a dial-up connection. As long as the acutal research projects at the University still have enough, no one should really care.
Especially when you realize that the dollars spent on maintaining the POTS system can be funneled into networking, thus offsetting the cost of the new VoIP system once POTS can be discontinued.
(Oh, and one more thing--if you've ever seen a VoIP system, it needs a real data connection--otherwise it wouldn't be "VoIP".)
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.
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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
Dude, if your girlfriend goes to Dartmouth, consider yourself dumped.
- Class of '94
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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)
Not really. The difference between wants and needs is irrelevant.
From the prespective of the IT/IS department, they need to worry about how much bandwidth consumption there's going to be, and that's it.
Not quite right. Sure, some IT departments may take that approach, but when I worked in the IT department of the school of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UNSW, we cared a *lot* about the difference between needs and wants.
We implemented a bandwidth quota for students and staff. Bandwidth would be allocated (generously) based on what courses people were doing. Research, PHDs and staff got heaps more. You got a minimum each session, plus a certain amount per subject you were doing. IE If you did Comp1011 (Intro to computing), you only needed a small amount of data. If you were doing three subjects, you got an allocation for each subject. If you were doing Networks, you got more bandwidth. The limits were set by the lecturers, and was very generous. It was very fair, and generally speaking, people didn't have a problem with their bandwidth. Students were able to buy extra bandwidth at cost price if they wanted more. It cost them less from us than any ISP.
Local bandwidth (Uni-wide) was not charged. Local (Australian) was charged what it cost us (fairly cheap..4c a meg or so) and international was charged at 9c a meg or so. This was all cost price. Aarnet was not charged at all (A local Aus mirror which holds heaps), plus we held heaps of local mirrors of all sorts of stuff. If the data was fetched from our proxy, you weren't charged.
At the end of the day, it was a complex system that worked to make sure people had enough data for Uni needs, plus a bit extra for personal. if you were big into downloading heaps of stuff...you paid for it yourself. The system had a lot of thought put in to make it as fair as possible, and to make sure that only "at cost" was charged. It wasn't fair that non-leeching students payed for leechers. We didn't want to make money out of it...just stop bleeding money ourselves.
Why not give everyone as much data as they wanted? We did up until about 2000, but the bandwidth cost was starting to kill us. In Australia we pay through our teeth for data. We didn't want to charge...but the bandwidth had to be payed for somehow.