College Students Turn Away From Landlines

prostoalex writes "You're as likely to find a landline in a college dorm as you're an old typewriter, according to this Washington Post article on MSNBC. While roughly 30% of college students had a cell phone 5 years ago, more than 90% have them today, resulting in student directories including out-of-state numbers instead of 4-digit extensions. More trivia on college students: 90% own a PC, 65% have broadband, 62% own a stereo system, 74% have a DVD player, 55% have a gaming system. What the Washington Post article also hints at, is possible tuition hikes due to the landlines dropped so quickly. "Six or seven years ago, telephones on campus were a cash cow," said Glenn Gaslin of Morrisville State College in New York."

Comments

Bush's fault

[Rollie Hawk]

If Bush and Michael Powell hadn't ruined the telecom industry, this never would have happened.

This is how they do this.

[El Camino SS]

I hate businesses that assume that you will buy certain services from them because they deem them 'essential', and when all of a sudden you don't, they jack up the price of the services you still do buy from them... ...How about my damned cable company (or phone company) that charges me an extra $10 a month because I just want a highspeed internet connection but don't want their cable offerings or long distance plan?

How can they get away with this BS?

Aren't there laws against this sorta crap?

Well, there WERE laws against this sort of crap, but then deregulation came around. The FCC doesn't get into consumer issues anymore, it is more concerned about showing tough to Johnny Sixpack about their supposed outrage with nipples and man-ass that they show on NYPD Blue. The FCC is not concerned with the a la carte offerings bill, because they (and by they, I mean the corporate cronies that get placed in the FCC by the system) have shot that thing down a bazillion times... all in the name of deregulation. "Why should companies be beholden to the government?!? If they regulate our prices, we'll go bankrupt!"

Deregulation of the basically five giant corporate entities that control all of the telephone, cable, and broadband access out there is not a good thing, even though idiots everywhere that haven't taken a basic econ class say it is. Then they did it. Simply put, all deregulation does in that situation is to break the contract of fairness between the public and the giganto-corporations. Let's all deregulate water! Hey, how about electricity?!? Imagine that!

Lower prices!
(for a short while until you forget the old times)
Better services!
(unless you get a dispute and you have no fair use contract with the city, and they won't run service to your area and business)
Corporations can do it better than the government!
(until the corporations slash maintenance to give money to another part of the corporation, leaving you with jacked up prices on basic services and shitty service)

Remember kids. Deregulation is a good thing. Especially with essential services such as power, light, phone, and water. I'm sure you'll love the way that you used to call the city council about infrastructure and get a response, and now you get to call INDIA. I'm sure the call representative in INDIA will really care about your cable problem.

This scam is about as good as having a political party that slashes the basic military infrastructure budget for infrastructure and not stealth bombers, forcing the military to subcontract basic services, and then forcing in a two party system an administration that owns said military subcontractors so they can engage in a no-end, non-specific war overseas, and then have no accountability for cost overruns, thus making tens, if not hundreds, of billions in cost overruns that are unaccounted for, and checked by their stockholders.

Ooops. Did I say that outloud?