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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.
In the UK, this has been the case for years. When I moved into Halls, there wasn't even a land-line phone available.
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...
In this case, tuition will go up because they stop making money on landline sales??? 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? It's like those computer stores that 'cash discount' their prices... Play on words to get around rules that prevent them from jacking up the price because you wanna pay by credit card...
Aren't there laws against this sorta crap?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I'm a freshman at BU and on a floor of 45 students, there is ONE landline (owned by a non-US student), everyone has computers - and a few of us have more than one. There is roughly a 5:1 windows to Mac ratio... although it's a little squewed because a couple of us have desktops and powerbooks. Everyone, unless they're non-US residents, has cell phones. Over 50% of us have iPods, use iTunes and share music. Yeah, we're hardware-laden students... and I love it!
how many students still have books today?
As technology moves on, there's not a lot else to be expected really. The cheap and widespread availability of wireless communication means that more students will be inevitably taking the easier option; who wants to be tied down while making a phone call?
To be frank, a change like this doesn't count as news, it's enevitable with evolving technology that things will change. This is just one of the many steps that are happening towards the much larger changes that are bound to come.
Certainly in Britain, where "Pay As You Go" phones took off far, far earlier than the US, it's been like this for a very long time. A student can buy a pay as you go phone now for £20, and all the major networks do various bundles / deals enabling you to buy cheaper airtime etc. etc.
It's far more attractive than a contract, and calls are normally cheaper on the mobile than on the uni phone system anyway.
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
'"Six or seven years ago, telephones on campus were a cash cow," said Glenn Gaslin of Morrisville State College in New York.'
And here we see a basic problem. Trying to earn more than a fair return because you have monopoly power in a certain situation.
They should never have been a cash cow in the first place, just a service provided to students with a modest rate of return.
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
"College Dorms Extremely Lucrative to Burglarize"
It's like Best Buy with beds and showers!
Why can't Universities run more programs at or near cost, rather than try to bilk as much money as possible out of people?
was with prices dropping from the "insane" level to the "almost reasonable" level, do any college students have plasma/LCD televisions? That's one place where it would actually make sense, space-wise, to have a slim TV. I would imagine that the risk of it being stolen would be extremely high. I would find a way to bolt that sucker in, somehow.
Anyone in college or dealing with college students in dorms know what the popularity of the LCD/plasma TVs is? From the smaller 13" ones to the 40- and 50-inchers?
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
not over here in good old germany.
DSL is only sold with a landline telehone contract. Cable isn't widely available as well.
the telco/isp regulation agency hasn't done anything against that situation. the last mile is usually still owned by the Deutsche Telekom as well.
With most of the major carriers offering free minutes for calls between *any* of their customers (not just those on a family plan), is it any wonder that so many students are showing up with cellphones? I was expecting to see commentary about carriers linking up with campuses in advertising arrangements. I would expect Verizon and Cingular/AT&T to turn campuses into battlegrounds reminding everyone that all calls to any other user on their network is free all day, every day, encouraging the students to convince their friends to all use the same carrier.
I remember using the community phone in the dorm hallway 16 years ago. I'm shocked that practice went on for another 11 years!!
Intelligent Life on Earth
It doesn't even make sense for most college students to shell out extra funds for a landline, and that's only for local service. Once you start added on long-distance, it's not very beneficial for the student who has a phone. At the University of Arizona, most students don't even have an landline off-campus. The providers down here at chomping at the bit to dry out our wallets via landlines; therefore, our cell phones end up serving for multiple purposes.
Why not have students get a University sponsored cell-phone with a few special features:
1. push-to-talk capability within Univ phones
2. free instant messaging within Univ phones.
3. Bluetooth and/or cable for internet access using the cell phone.
4. Free calling to/from a student's home town.(this would need a DID in student's home area code)
I'm sure there are more features that student's would love to have and be willing to pay for. Also, a cell phone company would love the contract to be the sole supplier to a college campus.
--Keith
The utility is to educate people like you about the :-)
free market and its possible offerings.
In USA there are regulations that keep the prices up.
Many people want to regulate the market.
We don't want that - We want freedom.
Free to Choose
Take my wife & I as an example.. We had 2 landlines here in our house. One was ours, the other is paid for by my company (I work from home). During a 2 month period, our home phone got shut off no less than 5 times. And before you start to think it - no, we paid the bill each month, on time. Each call to Verizon customer service was greeted with an endless sea of automated menus to troubleshoot your line. Thankfully, you can keep mashing down the 0 key to get a human on the phone.
Each time this happened, we were told that we could expect to see a technician at our house in some ridiculous amount of time, usually 3-8 days. Then, mysteriously, the line would start working again. The explanation was always some inane excuse like, "someone unplugged your line at the CO" or "we had a mux that failed". We complained about rotten service to CS reps, Supervisors, Supervisors of Supervisors, and even to the office of Ivan Seidenberg (the CEO of Verizon for those who don't know). Know where it got us? Nowhere, fast.
Tired of the crap, we voted with our feet. We were spending about $50 a month for the Verizon line, plus about another $35 for my wife's mobile. We popped over to the Cingular store and got a couple of phones on a family plan. I got a new number and we ported the home phone number over to the wife's mobile. Now our phones cost about $65 a month. We can call any Cingular customer (now including AT&T Wireless users) for free, have free nights & weekends, 850 min/mo and rollover. No coverage problems around here, and it all "just works".
And hey, if you decide to do something like this - make sure you port to a carrier OTHER than Verizon Wireless. That is, if you're doing it because you're sick of Verizon. Otherwise, if you're happy with them, do whatever you feel like.
The unsig!
I hear many a conversation about not even knowing one's dorm phone number because all the students use is a cell phone.
// end jealous rant.
Since dorm phone numbers change every year, it is just easier to keep one phone number I suppose. As a person without a cell phone (very odd for a technophile and a college student, I know), i personally find the damn things annoying, it's like AIM, but one that's everywhere. Sure, you can turn the damn thing off, but then you've got voice mail. Sometimes you do just need to cut off the world.
I'm not a college student, but I'll shortly be giving up my landline too.. Why? Cost. I'm paying about $30.00 CDN/mo for a landline, and about $50.00 CDN/mo for my wireless. I make/get maybe 10 calls each month on the landline, where the wireless is about 10-fold that. Most of my landline calls are just people trying it before they call my cell. Also, my cell has caller ID, voicemail, and call waiting, plus the ability to send/get text messages and e-mail. My landline can't do that.... or it can do some if I pay more money. I'll pass.
I read it that way, too. The summary was starting to seem like researchers had found that college students had some mystical power to avoid landmines in their dorms, even when concealed beneath crusty laundry and slithering pizza.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Could the lack of landline phones in dorms be because of the busy life that college students live? Who has time to answer a landline phone in your own dorm room when you're getting drunk until 5 am and sleeping in a different person's bed every night?
Beyond that, dorm rooms are for sleeping and you certainly don't want some annoying phone ringing when you're there.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Glanced the headline briefly, and thought that university administrator were getting desperate for methods to keep college students on campus.
I'll be going to Canberra for half a year to study (July-December). Could slashdot readers "down under" recommend a (mobile?) phone carrier and option that doesn't cost an arm and a leg? I have an unlocked GSM 900/1800 phone that I could bring.
where's all that Karma?
i think that most students spend their time outside of dormitories anyway so why pay for something that you do not use? i am not surprised at this.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
http://www.retailers.com/eduandevents/ask/askchar
The difference between a surcharge for credit (which is illegal) and a discount for cash (which is legal) is the advertised price--a retailer cannot charge a credit card customer more for an item than its advertised price. note- this is a US only law, the UK is different.
further, have you considered- you aren't being charged extra for not having other services from that particular carrier, you just aren't getting a bundled discount? if I want cable, part of the costs are suppling me with cable, and part of the costs are billing me for the cable.. if I take another service from the same company (internet access) the only additional charge is supplying me with internet access, billing can be included in the billing of the cable- therefore it does not have to be charged to me- if I add voip or regular pots telephone service, once again, I need only be charged for the service, not the billing.
yet if I take ONLY the internet service, they must cover the costs of billing.. these include financing the debt, covering bad debt, payment processing, mailing the bills, and disconnection if service is terminated with prejudice.
The truly amazing thing about big business, is that they are willing to discount for bundled services SO much, I expect big biz to be greedy beyond belief.. a ten dollar discount for loss of one bill is a good deal...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Comment removed based on user account deletion
when almost every college has wired internet in every dorm, why would anybody pay for a campus phone? the only phone i'm planning on having next year is a $20 broadvoice plan, with unlimited calling in the US and any other country i might call.
by comparison, verizon starts at $40 for 450 minutes, sprint starts at $35 for 300 minutes, cingular starts at $30 for 200 minutes - and that one doesn't even come with unlimited mobile-to-mobile or nights and weekends, and t-mobile, low-cost stalwart starts at $20 for 60 minutes, or $40 for the slightly less spartan 600 minutes.
oh, and all of those plans charge for incoming minutes too.
sure, having a broadvoice phone means that i can't use it outside my dorm room. (in practice, i could buy a wi-fi phone for $100 that would allow me to use it anywhere on campus, but i'll leave that aside for now.) but what's the disadvantage in walking down the street talking to actual people standing next to me, as opposed to irritating everyone else who has to hear one side of my conversation and missing out on any number of chances to meet new people?
If Bush and Michael Powell hadn't ruined the telecom industry, this never would have happened.
Before any liberals are tempted to mod up one of my comments, a word of warning: I'm actually making fun of you.
My brain also read it as landmines. I thought someone was making some kind of strange right-to-bear-arms point.
What I find interesting was that I didn't boggle at the notion that students were as likely to have a land mine as a typewriter.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
Here in Michigan (MSU), they provide landlines for free to students in the dorms. If you ask for a phone they will even give you that. Also, does TFA assume that if you have a cell phone that you don't have a landline? Cable TV is also provided for free to those who live in the dorms. I know they aren't technically "free" but you don't pay extra so you're a fool not to use either service.
and i already have all this stuff! Computer: Check (really nice check) Cell Phone: Motorola V505 Laptop: Check Dvd player: (i have my own gaming room complete with large tv and sony 6.1 surround!)
Your skill in reading has increased by one point!
I'm a graduate of Morrisville (class of 92!), and I can tell you why students have cell phones... Its in the middle of nowhere.. 20 minutes at 75mph to the nearest McD's.. --Everything-- is a long distance call.. I think you could call Hamilton as a local call, but that was about it. Cazanovia, the nearest decent size town, was long distance..
Of course, when I was there, we didn't have phones provided by the college my first year.. You could get a phone, but you had to order through the local phone company.. You did have pay phones, one or two for each dorm... My second year, the college provided the phones.. Now i know why...
Ah the memories... Pool at Chat and Spew... Beers at the Fort... Of course, NY Pizza was the best pizza in town (I still remember the number! 6849090..).. And damn it, they should have kept the computer room on the 1st level of the library!
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
I'm one of the 10% of college students that do not have a cell phone. Well, grad student but student all the same. I hate people that just yap yap yap into their phones whenever they have nothing that immediately requires their attention (especially those "queens of gossip" as I like to call them). Sitting on the bus I've practically heard people's life stories from hearing them talk on the phone. I just find it annoying I guess.
;)
On the otherhand, I know they are useful in times of emergency and when you are trying to meet up with someone somewhere, but that isn't enough justification for me to go get a cell phone. In the first place, I don't like talking on the phone so I don't do it that much. I have my landline in my apartment mostly so I can connect to DSL, that's about all I need these days.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
Wait, hold on, I thought it said they were as likely to have a landmine as they were to *be* a typewriter?
Or was it the Gentle Reader who is presumed to will have been a typewriter if the student had a landmine?
If the student turns away from the landmine, does that mean the rest of the students will face six more weeks of Intro to Accounting?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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 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?
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 obvious that this would happen. I live with 3 guys, and had 3 roommates last year too. We all have/had cellphones. Last year, my one roommate came to me asking to get a land line because he was going over his minutes with his cheating liar girlfriend, who was by far the worst person I've ever met in my life.
Like most of you other college slashdotters, my wallet DOES have a bottom. I told him hell no, it would end up costing me about $100 a year so that his retarded lazy-eyed girlfriend could call, let the phone ring 4.5 times and leave blank messages on the answering machine.
$100 ~= 10 cases of cheap beer (we drink Natty Light, haha)... I already have a cell phone, I'll keep my beer, thank you
Berto
http://www.q-dsl-home.de/
True, there has to be a physical line installed in your house. (Though it hasn't to be in active use) But show me a building in Germany without a phone line installed.
Also you can have phone from one company (like http://www.nordcom.net/) and DSL from another. Or just use the installed landline for DSL with QSC like I do and have a mobile phone from o2 http://www.o2online.de/o2/index.html like I do. o2 has the Genion option where at home your mobile acts like a normal landline phone, meaning you are reachable through the local area code for the usual rates and are able to phine out for cheap. This so called "HomeZone" often has a diameter of a few kilometers! Like in my case :) I can go inlineskating being still reachable through the "Landline" number :)
Old lady Telekom isn't your only option, you know ...
When I was going through the checkout process the other week the guy ahead of me had phone changes. The guy behind the counter sounded stunned as he asked "You have a phone bill here. Is that right?"
The customer responded that he had to send some faxes from his laptop and forgot the cord to go to his cel phone....
Universities have cell phone users
cell phone users need cell sites
cell phone companies pay money to let people house their cell sites.
so cell sites generate cash. Only problem is that cash probably does not go into telecommunications, and that that cow is more of a calf.
When I was in college (mid-80's), I hated the idea of having to pay a new hook-up every semester. I also hated trying to figure out the phone bill - who made what long distance call. And then you have room-mates who don't claim their calls, or don't pay on time, or who hogged the phone all day.
If they had cell-phones now, like they had then, no doubt about which way I'd go. Not to mention the convienience of have a phone with you everywhere you go.
I can just see a cluster of co-eds walking across the quad, when one trips a mine and half the group flies into the air in a flurry of legs and papers.
Might be a bad thing to see on a campus tour. Enrollment would certainly suffer. "Our largest problem here at MIT is one of attrition due to casualties. . ."
You are not the customer.
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.
But surely one could argue that the thinning of those students unable (or unwilling) to spot irregularities in the normally immaculate campus lawns are simply a wasteful drain on the financial aid systems?
I mean really, is there a better educational tool than high explosives?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
62% own a stereo system, 74% have a DVD player, 55% have a gaming system.
What percentage are on financial aid?
* Laptops. Are you kidding? There might have been one, or two people who had a C64 to play Space Taxi, but this was still a pipe dream. If you wanted to use a computer, you had to trudge on down to the computer lab and mess around on the 20 Mac Pluses avalable for use. Oddly, there was only 2 PC based machines to use. Only the teaching computer labs had PCs. The exciting point came when the English department opened up their brand spanking new computer lab with 40 Mac Plus SE/20s, complete with a dot matrix printer ensconced in a plexiglass enclosure (to reduce the printing noise). There were rumors that the English grad students had access to a laser printer, but no one ever was able to verify that for us. A desk attendant was at the ready to scan your floppy disks for any viruses before allowing you on one of the Macs. Those fearful of computers could still check out an electric typewriter.
* Phones. We all got landline phones connections as well included in the dorm cost. This was the year they ripped out the old black wall mounted rotary phones (they were tossed in an unused foyer, and I grabbed me about 5 to take home), and you had to provide your own. About 10% of the residents had a cordless phone.
* Home entertainment. About the same as your era, TVs were not too common; only about a quarter of the students had them. Every dorm had a TV in the common living area. Even though a neighbor would probably have a TV, students would go down to watch Letterman, munch out and whatnot. Stereos were much more common - about two out of three students had them.
* Other electronics. Also like your era, by far the most common devices were small fridges, popcorn makers and coffee makers. The more adventurous would install a microwave oven (banned by the residence rules) in their closet. Since the RA was not allowed to open your locked closet door during a room check, this would "hide" it from him with relative safety. After all those were the sweet innocent times when we didn't go to bed with a dozen of standby lights flashing at us from all directions, and when we were happy in our ignorant bliss.
DSL. As soon as the Telcos are forced to offer DSL without a voice line, it's going out. And if they try to hike the price, I'll move to cable. Since I don't have cable tv, cable broadband is the pricier option.
The ONLY calls we get on the landline are ones we don't want. Verizon selling something, non-proffits calling for money, politicians begging for votes.
...as you're an old typewriter
I happen to be a rather new typewriter, thank you.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
"Six or seven years ago, telephones on campus were a cash cow"
like the meal plans at colleges. they make it so expensive and force you to get it if you live in the dorms. they only give you crap food and give you so little to eat. the cafes are only open for a short period of time so if you have classes during those hours, it's your lost.
my blog
I doubt the dean would have noticed a few blast craters.
You are not the customer.
Where I live, the state university system decided to spend lots of bond money on their own switching equipment, so as to provide (and of course charge for) local phone service in the dorms. They did this about 8 years ago. I am guessing they had maybe 5 years of solid revenue until the cell phones proliferated and the game was over. I understand why they did it. Dorm phone service had been a giant cash cow for the phone companies (charging "installation" fees for the same lines every semester). It was just too juicy a target to pass up.
The REAL motivation was that state bond money was essentially a gift from Santa Claus -- the agencies that received the money were never obligated to pay it back. Operating money was the hard-fought budget battle that took place every year. Well, it seems that the snazzy new phone gear was purchased with bond money, and the fees paid by students became part of the operating budget. Unless the university system starts losing money on operational costs, the demise of the local phone cash cow is left for the taxpayers to deal with. My guess is that the taxpayers will spend the next 30 years paying for the state university phone network.
Of course, the path of least resistance is to use Internet access to subsidize the loss of phone revenue. The colleges can still surcharge the hell out of Internet access. That puts a band-aid on the problem, but only to the extent that students can be prevented from sharing via Wi-Fi.
My electronics include: - A cell phone - A landline that works for local calls (provided free in the dorms) - A 24" Flat CRT TV - A Computer (with a tv tuner since I didn't have a regular until last month) - A Game Cube - A DVD player - A Microwave - A Coffee Maker - A Coffe Grinder
I just moved to a new place and the only reason we have a landline is because it was a package deal for cable + internet + phone. It's actually cheaper than without the phone line. Before we even knew the number or given it out we had people calling it. They were obviously telemarketers. The line was up for about 2 days and it started ringing right away. This is my first landline in several years and I'm sure I will never use it. Are cell #'s not allowed to be given out to telemarketers? I bet that changes soon.
...for long. With VoIP+wireless phones coming, the universities will be able to charge for the backbone usage. Networks are the new "cash cow".
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I don't have anything to do with either companies.
What the actual article said was just that landlines had been a cash cow- the word "tuition" does not appear in the article. And for good reason- usually, the dormitory/residence expenses and tuition are kept separate and some effort is made to balance things according to expenses. A reasonable college/university would not raise tuition to subsidize caviar in the cafeteria and would not expect to fund a new science lab with increased dorm fees.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
1. 10 years ago most of the televisions at home were black and white, now they are colour.
2. 10 years ago college kids moved on buses, now they have their cars.
3. 10 years ago people wrote science papers on paper, now they use laptops.
4. 10 years ago engineers drew building plans directly on a blue print paper, now they use CAD.
5. 10 years ago I was ten years younger, now I am ten years older.
Now if that's not news, tell me what is!!!
Credit companies have turn to tactics like usuriously high interest rates, and STEEP increases in interest rates based on nothing to do with your relationship with the company. The consumer credit market is quite staturated, so the only way these companies can show any real revenue growth is to keep coming up with more innovative ways to screw their customers. My advice...stay away from credit cards except for absolute emergencies. Accepting a credit card these days is like shackling yourself and giving them the key.
.... campus phones were such a cash cow racket, especially the long distance rates.. Luckily my family was somewhat clueful in the day and I could send them email via internet-fidobbs gateways with only the occasional call for emergency fundage ;)
And with increasing manditoriality of computers (laptop required policies) on campus and dorm ethernet/campus wireless, it would be silly to not be running some cheap VoIP and/or Skype..
Between this and eBay for textbooks, it's fun to watch all these excessive student ripoffs get the rich fisting they deserve...
Yup, most students have a PC, a game console, a TV, a cell phone, and broadband Internet... ...but they're all adamant that they can't afford to spend money on software.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I suspect that a student that received a lower grade for this reason could have it reversed very easily.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.'"
Very, very, true. Except maybe that very few students "respect" their teachers anyway, so it really does not make much difference, eh?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
> You're as likely to find a landline in a college
> dorm as you're an old typewriter...
Well, I'm definitely not an old typewriter...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Did anyone else read this as 'College Students Turn Away From Landmines'?
I've heard of some pretty crazy dorm pranks, but that seems a little extreme.
I'd say 90% of cell phone conversations go like this:
"Hey So-and-so, how are you doing? Ya I'm doing fine. So whatcha up to? That's cool. Nah I'm not doing much. So that's cool. Anyways give me a call tomorrow. See-ya."
Frivolous, superficial, ego-boosting conversations that sound like teenybopper gossip. It's funny to watch a person with cell phone "play" with their phones when no one is calling. They fiddle with it, and play a little game with an anxious look on their face - you know they can't wait for that next call, their next fix. And then they end up just calling some random person for no reason at all to talk about nothing.
I actually own a cell phone. But I got a pay-as-you go plan to augment my Vonage home phone. I get the mobility benefits from the cell, and low long distance plan & out-of-country phone number (Canadian line while living in US) from Vonage. My total monthly fees for phones have never been as low as they are for me now.
Anyway, I repair computers for money, buy and sell computer stuff, and buy, repair, and sell automobiles - that part is going slowly right now... sometimes I need to be in contact with people.
Anyway, if mummy and daddy were paying for my life, I would be a whole lot more relaxed and probably get better grades... my GPA is only 3.51 or something :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"land line." Thank you for your attention.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
This entire article seems to forget one thing. The income from a university on phones was never that that great. The article says that it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.... As far as I can tell from a university thats nothing.
The average private universities tuition is rapidly approaching $30k/year (not counting room and board). I know my school is just off from that (But I'm a grad student so I don't worry as much). With costs like that the university doesn't care about a few hundred thousand dollars. Accept 4 more students and its done.
Its especially scary when you factor in that the school claims that tuition accounts for less then half of its income. Granted much of this tuition goes to cover financial aid for other students (note I said financial aid as scholarships are now reserved for athletics).
But as far as dropping land lines.. I don't really like that idea. I was one of those hold outs. I didn't have a phone until a year ago after a couple car problems when I broke down and got one. But I still know people without cell phones. And no these aren't the anti technology crowd, but the comp e's and comp scis. They just don't want to be reached all the time. Granted their the same people who didn't answer their phones half the time anyways. I think their biggest excuse is why should I pay $50 a month for a phone.... If i need to call someone I can borrow someones phone, and if they need me well they can try around or leave me a message on aim.
The assumption that everyone has a phone is just overrated.
Phil
I will switch to cell phone exclusively when my wife will be able to talk for hours every day (as she currently does) for the price that we currently pay for landline + cellphone. BTW, we pay $10 for cellphone (special offer, 30min a month) and $37 for landline, all taxes included. So get us 3000 minutes for $50 and we're switching.
So those "asshats" own most of your employer...
Since I was particularly po'd at Verizon, I didn't see the need to continue lining their pockets when I made the choice to move to mobiles.
Disclaimer: The guys I know that work at VZW are nice guys. Verizon losing my few $$ won't put any of those guys out of work.
The unsig!
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.
While this may account for a VERY small (like, 1% of 1% of 1%) drop in income for colleges, I wouldn't so as far as to blame cell phone use for the recent tuition hikes.
Let's assume that students pay $20/mo to the college, plus long distance. I'd say that maxes out at $50/mo, times 8 or 9 months, or about $400/year. And depending on the school, a small percentage of students actually live on campus.
Sadly, tuition costs have doubled in some smaller colleges and universities. The $400 hardly makes up for that increase.
-David
Executive summary: Stop buying $300 cell phones, and take a trip to the dollar store, you mooches!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
My daughter is a freshman in an out-of-state college. The long-distance plan attached to her dorm-room service was quite simply outrageous.
She doesn't use the phone service, which is included in her room charge, to call us. She either calls us on her cell and has us call her back on the landline, or IMs us and we call her back. She uses the cell for true emergencies.
Maybe less students would see the need to have cell phones if the long distance plans offered with their phone service were more affordable.
On-campus college costs are a HUGE ripoff. Don't even get me started on the meal plans!
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.
You're an old typewriter. :-P
/. post clearly implied that we readers are NOT old typewriters ("You're as likely to find a landline in a college dorm as you're an old typewriter"), so cool off and beat your fisticuffs into plowshares (or, better yet, into old typewriters!)
Actually, the
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
My advice...stay away from credit cards except for absolute emergencies. Accepting a credit card these days is like shackling yourself and giving them the key.
Or you can just pay off your balance every month, which means you don't pay interest, but do get some level of fraud protection and often cash back.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Oh, man, I was reading that as 'landmines' and wondering why on Earth a student would have one in his dorm. I got halfway through the comments before realising. I'm having a slow day today.
Here in the USA, we are no socialists. If you feel "ripped off", then don't pay for the services. So as long as there is competition in the area, keep the fucking government out of the free market!!
Life is not for the lazy.
And that means less interference with wireless networks.
When I was a college student, my PC was my stereo, DVD player, and gaming system, and now it's my television as well. I've never tried VOIP, but it could be my phone someday, too.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
IMO, anyone who relies entirely on their mobile phone without at least having a land line as a backup is a fool. Mobile phones are great, don't get me wrong. They're small, they're convenient.
However, does anyone here remember September 11, 2001, and/or the New York blackout of August 2003? Land lines worked well. However, mobile phones, including mine, did not work at all. If all you had was a mobile phone and you wanted to try to reach a loved one, you were screwed. I, as well as many others, learned from both experiences that it's completely foolhardy to solely rely on a mobile telephone.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
this isn't from the "No Shit" department?
I can relate to your story about Verizon. Our neighbors had a problem with the landline, so Verizon sent out a technician.
The technician fixed our neighbors line and broke ours. So we called up Verizon using our cell phones to complain, let me tell you, it's very nagging to be put on hold by Verizon while your valuable plan minutes ticks away. After explaining the situation Verizon sends out two guys to fix our line.
On our next phone bill there was a charge for fixing our line. This really upset me and I had to call back again to Verizon to get this issue resolved, it took me 20 minutes to explain and to get Verizon to admit that they screwed up. Verizon got to be the worst phone company I ever dealt with and this wasn't the fist time that I've had problems with them.
I am employed by a small college IT department, and let me tell you - it's very frustrating to contact students to let them know that you've repaired their account when the phone number listed in the directory doesn't have a phone attached.
Every dorm room has a landline provided at no additional cost to the students, yet it seems that only about 20% of the students actually have phones connected. I'm sure it doesn't help that students must provide their own phones.
A wise person makes his own decisions, a weak one obeys public opinion. -- Chinese proverb
"Student directories including out of state numbers!" Oh no! There's no reason the school's PBX can't be set up for an extension for each student which is forwarded onto their cells. Hell, you could even allow them to change the forward online -- good for co-op semesters and vacation.
The only "problem" is that the local telcos are pissed because the schools cut deals with them to offer packaged service to the students (which usually sucks, is one-size-fits-all, and often comes with fixed rates from 5-10 years ago which are outrageous even compared to cellular).
Landline is going to die anyway. People are going to realize that the ability to have their home phone number also be portable is better than having to hand out multiple phone numbers to everyone just so they can reap the easy access benefit the telecommunication age is supposed to bring.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I was rockin' to your post until I read this. As any telecom afficionado knows, Verizon landlines are handled by Verizon Domestic Telecom, while mobile is handled by Verizon Wireless. They use completely separate equipment, service centers, and billing systems.
I've never had a problem with Verizon Wireless. And I have a plan that's $40 for the first phone, and $20 for each additional. Back when Cingular hadn't changed its name from Cellular One to rid itself of the bad publicity its bad service got, billing mistakes turned my service into a nightmare, so I switched. Never had a problem since. So there! :)
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
It's a heck of a lot more fun watching some TV shows with a group of friends. For instance, at my College, I have a group of students who come around every week to watch The Apprentice and The Amazing Race where we can collectively hurl abuse/ridicule etc at the contestants.
Depends on the university. The university I am at now (NC A&T) - most of the lecturers are using books they didn't write or have any input into (with the exception of one course), and they pretty much lecture from the book. So a book I have found was absolutely essential... and no they don't photocopy the book periodically and hand it out and no they don't keep copies of the text in the library.
However, at the Uni of Dundee, the library did keep some copies of the texts and the lectures weren't always straight out from the book; you were encouraged to take notes. I say did, because that was some years ago!
So at the uni I am at now, books are essential.
Mark.
Incidentally, they are now pushing Cingular Wireless phones with a "special" university offer every year at orientation (and with the mailings before) and looking (for the future) into some way to combine their wireless network with some PDA/phone they can give to all students as part of their "incoming freshman" technology package. There's nothing particularly exciting on that front yet, though...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
who read that as college students turn away from landMines?
I didn't see the word 'tuition' once in the article.
Tuition hikes have a great deal more to do with a lack of state funding than on-campus telephone usage. Some states cover(ed) 3/4 of college tuition for state residents. States are reallocating their budgets to provide social services in place of federal government programs that have been gutted to shore up money for federal tax breaks.
My state also relies on legalized gambling in the form of a state lottery to provide small scholarships to students. It works pretty well. Desperate and uneducated people buy between $5 and $20 in lottery tickets weekly which, in turn, pays for white surburban kids to go to college. Its a wonderful example of the lower and middle classes working together, which is good because neither one will be seeing much in the way of the aforementioned tax breaks.
65% have broadband
I live on campus and have a 100 Mbps Ethernet drop into the school's backbones (primarily a T3). I'd say it qualifies as "broadband," but faster and without upload caps.
I thought this was pretty much the case on any college campus? All resident students get Internet access?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I'm in my first year at college, and have noticed the same thing the article's pointing out.
We all get a phone number with local service for free. Long distance is pretty cheap.
I've never paid more than a couple dollars a month. (I'm thinking most of it's in administrative fees, too.) If it's a local call, I use the landline: it's free. (The college absorbs the cost, technically. To me, though, it's free.)
But the reason I use my cell phone so much (besides the fact that my parents foot the bill *grin*) is that cell phone providers offer so much that my school's phone service doesn't.
All of the US is a 'local' call as far as my cell carrier is provided. So, unless I know I've used up most of my minutes, I use my cell phone for any long distance calls, because there's no additional cost.
The "Free Nights and Weekends" thing is a huge draw, too; late-night calls are always done on the cell phone.
I still have a landline phone, though. Some don't. It's especially great on campus, as intracampus calls are free as well.
It really shouldn't be surprising that fewer people are using landline phones. At least on my campus, they haven't even tried to keep pace with cell phone plans.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I feel like an old fogie -- when I was a sophomore in college, *two* students in my dorm had PCs. I was one of them. By the time I was a senior, probably a dozen did. Maybe half the students had stereos. One had a TV in his room. One had a private telephone. One had a laserdisc player but no TV. A few had those little refrigerators.
Now it sounds like most all of the students are ensconced in their own little den of luxury.
Where did all this wealth come from? It can't be just that the prices of consumer electronics dropped, because phone service hasn't dropped in price that much.
Our campus telecom office doesn't seem to understand telephone pricing. Students could get a free dorm phone with free local calling but paid the AT&T undiscounted rate for long distance. That was based on mileage bands which worked out to about $0.35 a minute to New York. Campus offices are charged the same rate. All this despite the fact that they negotiated cheaper rates from the long distance providers. The unfairness of these rates in the dorms fell on deaf ears. Now they don't offer long distance service in the dorms and we lost a lot of money to buy computing and network equipment. Oh, and our campus provides free cable TV and 10/100 Ethernet in all the dorm rooms.
signature pending slashdot approval
I would think that any "telecom afficionado knows" that Verizon Wireless is in fact mostly owned by Verizon Communications. Cellco, the actual name of the company is a partnership between Verizon Communications and Vodafone.
Like I said before, the guys I know that work for VZW are nice guys, but if I'm making a decision to not support a specific company with my business, why would I support a company that is owned in no small part by the company I'm trying to "punish"?
The unsig!
In other news, use of carrier pigeons by college students is down 100%. Use of quill pens has also dropped dramatically. The sky is blue. Why is it news that land lines are steadily moving towards extinction?
Let me guess. You're from Iowa.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
That's funny... I could have sworn that free market economics supports the industry's right to choose more than the consumer's. A theoretical free-market economy removes all restrictions on companies that don't directly protect the public. This means, for example, that cigarette and alcohol companies would be allowed to sell directly to children.
I just wrote a paper for my college-senior-level Business Ethics class on this very subject. Every student in my class came to the same conclusion: free market economics is an inherently flawed concept.
By the way, your comment was not insightful. It was basically a troll.
I am scientifically inaccurate.