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.

Comments

No Registration Link

[davemabe]

Here is the no registration NYT link.

"Too cheap to meter"

[strudeau]

It turns out it was costing them more to bill the students for local and long distance than for the calls themselves.

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.

Re: "Too cheap to meter"

[FreeLinux]

There are two reasons at play here. The first reason is that thanks to VoIP the per minute cost is somewhere around 1 cent per minute and may be less. This is due to a combination of VoIP and volume discount contracts between Dartmouth and long distance carriers.

In the case of normal carriers, their very large subscriber base can be easily used to spread out the cost of the call accounting system that they use for billing and they have no issues. However, Dartmouth's subscriber base is infinitely smaller. Also, Dartmouth is using Cisco's VoIP solution whose call manager and accounting system is less than stellar in quality and capability and more than outrageous in price.

This results in a situation where it would cost Dartmouth much more to purchase and maintain the crappy accounting system than it would to give away the 1 cent per minute calls. Now, in the case of most companies this would not stop them from charging 25 cents or more per minute to cover the cost of the accounting system. But, it seems that someone at Dartmouth realized that long distance service is already available in that area for this price or less so no one would use their service and Cisco would not "underwrite" their lab. By giving the service away, it costs Dartmouth very little but, they get a high tech lab with all of the latest Cisco toys. It results in a win for Dartmouth, a win for Dartmouth students and a win for Cisco who will go around bragging about the thousands of stations that they have deployed, just like they do about all the other VoIP systems that they have given away. Ultimately, some PHB is going to fall for their sales pitch and actually pay them for their crappy system that actaully describes "Dial Tone" as a feature.

VoIP DDoS

[grub]

Get all your Dartmouth friends to call the Help Desk on their leet VoIP phones and yell "PING" repeatedly when the person answers.

quality vs latency

[jakedata]

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

Voip phones, the downside

[Olin 06]

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.

The billing cost more than the calls.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Dartmouth Phone System

[querencia]

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.

Continuing the BASIC tradition

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.