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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?
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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!
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
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'"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?
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
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
I spent a fortune in books in my first year.
By the second year I'd wised up that:
(a) most lecturers didn't even use the books, and those that did gave out photocopied notes.
(b) for homework purposes the library had several copies
(c) half the books were written or co-written by the lecturers an they were getting a cut.
So for the second year I bought no books at all. Didn't miss them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What competition?? I have exactly *one* choice if I want cable TV, or broadband internet. I can go w/ dial-up access, or satellite, but that isn't really the same thing as competition for cable, just like a private limosine (sp?) company is not really competition for a taxi service.
Besides, the point is the government is already involved in this market. My tax $$ subsidized the building of the infrastructure these companies are now gouging me to use. I didn't volunteer this money, nor receive anything in exchange for it. The government took it from me, with the implied threat of harm if I refuse to give it, then gave this $$ to telecommunication companies w/o my permission or consent.
In the US, there is plenty of socialism for CORPORATIONS, there is just very little government subsidization of private citizens.