Slashdot Mirror
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."
I have not met one person here (University of Minneapolis) who does not own a PC. I also have not met anyone else here who runs an OS other than Windows.
except when one rings during my lecture.
... for the rest of the semester, at least.
Never fails, despite warnings to the contrary. So I INSIST that they take the call -- right then, right there. I see a few others stealthily reaching into their backpacks to turn theirs off.
I don't have any problems
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Hey! Verizon Landline is totally separate from Verizon Wireless. They don't have a single person working for them in common AFAIK. They are owned by some of the same people, but just because Verizon landline is a bunch of rotten asshats, don't lump us in with them.
Disclaimer: I work for Verizon Wireless
it's because the credit card companies double-dip; they charge you for using the credit card, and they charge the business for running it through
Just like the internet. They used taxpayer dollars to set it up, 401(k) money to subsidize its commercialization, and now we pay through every possible pocket to use it.
And the top investors still ran off with all the initial startup capital when the markets tanked.
And they still can't keep from selling our private information around in every possible database.
And they still can't stop spam outfits from being profitable.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
Even better, as things like AT&T's CallVantage service get bigger, use VoIP service to deliver more to the cellphone users. Charge students maybe $100 for the year, if they want, for a system where calling your dorm number will call your cellphone instead. Work with the cellphone companies to make these all local calls (not a big deal since everyone has free long-distance anyway). That way your parents have a local number to call you with (your original cell phone), and you have a local number to keep in touch with all the students and professors. Campus and town employers might like it too, since they are loathe to make long-distance calls to their student employees.
Speaking of VoIP, companies are getting closer to phones that would be able to seemlessly switch between cellular and Wi-Fi access. That would be another possibility, students with those phones could buy really cheap VoIP minutes from the University to use while on campus. This requires that every square inch of the campus (well, almost every square inch) be covered with wi-fi access, but that's already been done on some smaller campuses (Wake Forest)
I started university in the UK in 2000 and have actually noticed more and more people living in private residences have been getting landlines. The reason is simple, adsl. I've not known one person who got a landline simply for the purpose of voice calls.
As for those in university accomodation, my university provides network connections on the wall rather than having some useless 3rd party come in to sell us "broadband" that runs at 128kbps for £20pm with no choice to us.
Hardly anyone in university accomdation seems to get landlines, they all just use mobiles. Except for the few who want ADSL as well as the university connection.
Another case of a monopoly doing themselves in.
The universities are moaning about their loss of revenue from the land-line cash cow but it is their own fault. If they had installed sufficient 802.11g wireless routers throughout campus (as well as around the bars off campus) and provided wireless VoIP service, they could have undercut the cell phone providers. People who live off campus don't buy land line service from the university, anyway, and the ones who live on campus rarely stray off campus so they could be tempted by a service that allows unlimited calls (some cellular companies offer unlimited calls by they have limited coverage but systems with reasonable coverage charge exhorbitant rates for daytime minutes). And the system could be setup to deliver calls to your PC when you are in your dorm room. A typical university already has much of the infrastructure. It already has a high speed network. It already owns the buildings where the access points would be installed. It already has right of ways in the form of steam tunnels located under the sidewalks allowing access points to be added between buildings easily. It already has a PBX with trunk lines to connect to landlines.
No, the school wouldn't have a monopoly but it would be competing against cell phone services that cost more than the university charged for land lines.
Bandwidth would be an issue so they would need to go with lots of access points with small antennas located inside buildings or along sidewalks rather than a few access points with big antennas on the roof.
Incidentally, we recently upgraded to Motorola V300 phones, they're super slick. You can load the software from V500 and V600 phones on them, turn on mpeg4 video clips (as if there were a purpose to that) and so on. My phone went from dual-band gsm to quad-band and I turned a bunch of other stuff on as well. You can even load java apps into it yourself after a little hacking, easily done with a tool called p2kseem.
Moving away from landlines is the surest way to get more cellphone coverage. I encourage everyone to do it so we can abandon the stupid copper plant and let the phone company focus on providing fiber for high-bandwidth connections around town. I wouldn't mind buying broadband from them if I could do it cheaply without their crappy phone service.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Dorm landline phones suck anyway. In my dorm, you paid the phone company an activation fee at the beginning of the semester. If you stayed for the summer, you had to move to a special dorm and pay another activation fee. Then at the beginning of the next school year that fall you paid another activation fee as you moved back. Two activation fees every year just for the privilege of doing business with you? No thanks.
I'm not sure how the situation is on other campuses, but at my school, long distance was never a cash cow. They used to offer optional services through AT&T, but most students abandoned the plan when Cosco et al started offering really cheap calling cards. (This was years ago.) The university wasn't making enough to make the billing overhead worth it.
The problem now for us is just the opposite: our on-campus telecom group charges outrageous rates for long distance, making it expensive to call students on their cell phones. (We're talking connect fee + high per minute fee...) Because it is so expensive, it is prohibited in many departments to call students back on their cell phones.
So while we escaped one classic phone company rip-off, we're still ensnarled in another.
And as a consumer, if I cannot pay cash, I will go somewhere else. I rarely buy on plastic, for several reasons. That includes the time I purchased a car with cash, but that's a different, if amusing, story about how the state likes to know about certain commercial transactions.
I forget what 8 was for.
I attended Purdue University. One year I lived in Carey Quad, which happned to border the football stadium. Our parking lot was pimped out as premium parking during home games, so the actual residents got kicked out (ticketed, otherwise) so the alums could park.
I lost count at how many poor lot attendants I ripped a new one each Saturyday morning when I'd tried to park in the lot that I paid extra for (above and beyond standard room & board). I finally pitched such a fit in the office that they refunded a substantial amount of my parking fee. :)
I can't see how they had the right to deny our parking to begin with, but it seems that deep-pocketed alums are worth more than tuition-paying students.
To this day I laugh my ass off whenever I get a plea-with-the-alums-for-money notice in the mail. Like that evil university will ever get another cent of my money.
Method of processing duck feet
If you're dealing with a utility or a telecomm company and not getting anywhere, call your states Public Utility Commission (the "PUC"). Whenever I've done this, the Evil Company in question jumps. They may not always concede if the rules with the state are in their favor, but at least you can grin at the knowledge that *somebody* at that company had to deal with a lot of paperwork if you filed a formal complaint.
My most recent "victory" was against Questar Gas (natural gas utility). Somebody at the PUC convinced them to address my complaint, in spite of the rules siding with them, just so nobody (at PUC or Questar) would need to file the paperwork.
The State still has *some* teeth in it. :)
Method of processing duck feet