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Wireless Networking Education The Internet Hardware

Free VoIP for Dartmouth Students 194

Posted by michael from the too-cheap-to-meter dept.
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.
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Free VoIP for Dartmouth Students More

Free VoIP for Dartmouth Students

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  • No Registration Link (Score:5, Informative)

    by davemabe ( 105354 ) * on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @04:56PM (#7037520) Homepage
    Here is the no registration NYT link [nytimes.com].
  • Does this apply to dial-a-pr0n lines???

  • Non-NYT link (Score:3, Informative)

    by mrpuffypants ( 444598 ) * <mrpuffypants@gm a i l . c om> on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @04:56PM (#7037527)
    http://news.com.com/2100-12-5080449.html

  • stupid (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Boromir son of Faram ( 645464 )
    This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days, so having any sort of voice capabilities in dorms is a waste of resources. OTOH, students have extremely high data transfer needs. The bandwidth being wasted in VoIP would be much better utilized in data connections. Oh well, I guess the kids can just use modems over the VoIP lines.

    • Re:stupid (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Brahmastra ( 685988 )
      OTOH, students have extremely high data transfer needs

      Do students have high data transfer needs or high data transfer wants? There's a big difference between wants and needs

    • Re:stupid (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kwerle ( 39371 )
      This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days, so having any sort of voice capabilities in dorms is a waste of resources. OTOH, students have extremely high data transfer needs.

      No, a few geeks have high data transfer needs. And if you rule out kazaa and other "pirate networks" (which a campus seems likely to do), what does that leave?

      The bandwidth being wasted in VoIP would be much better utilized in data connections.

      Like what?
      • Games, lots and lots of 64 person BF1942 and DC servers please.

        And 128 person servers for HL2. (/me starts rumor)
        • Games, lots and lots of 64 person BF1942 and DC servers please.

          And 128 person servers for HL2. (/me starts rumor)

          OK, I'll bite. In the incoming freshman class of 1000 (according to the article), how many of those do you suppose will be playing BF, DC, or HL2 at any given time? How many will be playing on a server that's off-campus?

          And if there's any contention of bandwith, who do you suppose the admin is going to frown on - the games or the voip?

          Yeah, I know you're mostly kidding, but I'm mostly repl
      • the actual bandwidth usage of most codecs used with VoIP is very low.

        Latency is the major issue, not bandwidth.

    • Dear God! (Score:4, Funny)

      by jared_hanson ( 514797 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:07PM (#7037652) Homepage Journal
      Oh well, I guess the kids can just use modems over the VoIP lines.

      Yep, they can also use rabbit ears to pick up television even though cable is supplied for free.

    • Re:stupid (Score:5, Funny)

      by Planesdragon ( 210349 ) <<su.enotsleetseltsac> <ta> <todhsals>> on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:07PM (#7037657) Homepage Journal
      OTOH, students have extremely high data transfer needs

      Yeah. They need to scan in their handwritten notes and send them to their professiors sans-compression, which takes all of--no, wait, that's not it.

      I mean, yeah, they need to stream WAVs of the lectures from the professors... no, not that.

      er, I mean, they need to transfer their written by-hand linux configuration to their CompSci professor--no, wait, that can better be done by handing in a burnt CD, and no one would waste class time on that...

      Wait, I got it! Students need to engage in a copyright-free multimedia environment that's littered with, ah, er... entertainment...

      VoIP sounds like a better and better use of student bandwidth--especially given that most student projects can be transmitted in a manner of minutes over a dial-up connection. As long as the acutal research projects at the University still have enough, no one should really care.

      Especially when you realize that the dollars spent on maintaining the POTS system can be funneled into networking, thus offsetting the cost of the new VoIP system once POTS can be discontinued.

      (Oh, and one more thing--if you've ever seen a VoIP system, it needs a real data connection--otherwise it wouldn't be "VoIP".)

    • Re:stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:07PM (#7037660) Journal
      This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days

      So what happens when cell phones start coming with a flavor of 802.11 and SIP [networkcomputing.com] built in? Oh, then you can roam onto your residential VoIP service (like Vonage [vonage.com] or packet8.net [packet8.net] without *any* per minute fees. Same thing on the campus LAN. Or Starbucks. Or McDonalds (free minutes with the purchase of a happy meal).

      'Tis only a matter of time before we won't need PSTN anymore. This is the first step to that.
    • How can you bemoan an advance like this, based upon students have extremely high data transfer needs.

      I don't want to get into the argument about whether these perceived 'needs' this is based upon are legal or not, but there are also other perspectives. This is surely a reasonable test of VoIP, which should be welcomed as a step forward along this technical path. Not only that, but sooner or later (I'll leave others to debate which this will be) the majority of us may very well have a need for concurrent

    • Re:stupid (Score:5, Informative)

      by phoxix ( 161744 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:11PM (#7037712)
      This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days, so having any sort of voice capabilities in dorms is a waste of resources.

      Not true!

      My friend goes to DM, and she says that few have cell phones at the school. Additionally, if you look at all the major cell phone providers of the USA, none claim to have service in Hanover NH (the school's location). (There is a way you can get service over there via AT&T, but thats another story.)

      So what this school is doing works out well.

      Sunny Dubey

      • yep (Score:4, Funny)

        by appleLaserWriter ( 91994 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @06:50PM (#7038601)
        I just spent a ghetto-riffic weekend in New Hampshire and was amazed to find that I could only get a GSM signal on my ATT Wireless phone within about 2 miles of the Manchester airport.

        Fortunately, they do have electricity in New Hampshire, so I was able to do some offline work on my powerbook...
    • I think that setting up VoIP in lieu of a traditional campus-based PSTN is genius. You consolidate your switching structure (everything ends up as ethernet packets), you enable cheap long-distance (these are college students, they're going to call home), and extremely scalable local communications (build a new dorm, put in cat-5 and hook them up to the campus backbone.)

      The only problems I see are possible quality of service issues if the network is saturated with traffic... like that generated from files
    • What about those who connect to their dorm wirelessly? Can they still use the VoIP apps on their laptop or PDA?

    • Re:stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mister Attack ( 95347 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @06:04PM (#7038217) Journal
      Well, most students nationwide may have cell phones, but I'd say less than 10 percent of Dartmouth students do. For one thing, the reception is spotty at best, and I think only AT&T serves Hanover. For another, campus e-mail use is phenomenally high -- everyone uses Dartmouth's BlitzMail system, which works kind of like IMAP in that messages are stored centrally and you can get to them from any computer on campus (in fact, public computers are often referred to as "Blitz terminals.") You can even order pizza, Chinese, and all the other delivery options in town online -- so really the only use for a phone at Dartmouth is to call businesses (see who sells CO2 for your kegerator) or to call home. Dartmouth just made calling home free, which you have to admit is pretty nice.

      As an aside, I disagree strongly that it is a waste of resources to have voice capabilities in dorms. In most cases, the wiring is already there, so it's a sunk cost -- might as well use it. When you're building new dorms, the marginal cost of adding phone wiring is minimal, so you might as well do it. Additionally, the capabilities have to be there for emergency services. Finally, there are plenty of people out there (myself included) who just don't have 500 bucks a year to spend on a cellular calling plan. All in all, it's definitely not a waste to keep phones in the dorms.

      (Dartmouth '03, BTW, so I know what I'm talking about wrt campus phone use)

    • Re:stupid (Score:3, Insightful)

      by raju1kabir ( 251972 )

      This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days, so having any sort of voice capabilities in dorms is a waste of resources.

      One of the reasons they are doing this, and which I think justifies the entire thing on its own, is that they want to study the social and infrastructural impacts of a widescale wifi/voip deployment. That kind of knowledge is going to be useful for all of us, either directly or through the next-generation networks that build on it.

      OTOH, students have extr

  • Do this anyway (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Brahmastra ( 685988 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @04:58PM (#7037546)
    If someone makes a large number of long distance calls, it is more sensible to use Voice over IP anyway rather than use a regular phone. There are many reasonably priced Voice over IP services out there for people in colleges that don't provide this.

  • Voice Over IP... GREAT!!!! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now, how do I make it work over my cell phone????
    • How do you know that your cell provider isn't already using VoIP to route the calls through its own systems? GSM/CDMA/TDMA are just the protocol from cell phone to tower(s)... and if the call is already in digital form...

  • Local and Long Distance? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kevin_conaway ( 585204 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @04:59PM (#7037554) Homepage
    Is this setup to connect to a POTS somewhere (to make local and long distance calls) or is it just around the campus?

    • Re:Local and Long Distance? (Score:4, Informative)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:18PM (#7037761)
      Yep, the idea is to route the within-campus calls locally, and only give the PTSN the calls that need to head off campus. The advantage of the univerisites doing it themselves (whether it's VoIP or just a PBX) is that the school can route local calls to the local phone monopoly, but can hand long-distance calls directly to the long-distance carrier of choice to bypass the ILEC and save even more.
    • RTFA:

      Using the software together with a headset, which can be plugged into a computer's U.S.B. port, the students can make local or long-distance telephone calls free. Each student is assigned a traditional seven-digit phone number.

  • Free long distance? For college freshmen? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Steve G Swine ( 49788 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @04:59PM (#7037556) Journal
    Pity the guy whose girlfriend goes away to Dartmouth... how many hours will he spend on the phone while she flunks out?

  • "Too cheap to meter" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by strudeau ( 96760 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:00PM (#7037563) Homepage
    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.
    • Mass transit??? Pushing people around costs a lot more than pushing packets, my friend. Most public transit systems get only a portion of their revenue from fees, and must also get support through the general tax fund (which is well worth the investment in reducing traffic and pollution).
      • Most public transit gets support through taxation precisely because the cost of ticketing is so high. For an example of how it is being dealt with, witness how London Transport has recently declared that tickets must be bought from machines before you board buses in central London, and announced price freezes for prepay smart cards and long term passes (which have low collection costs per journey) for 2004, while increasing the cost of single journey fares by up to 25%.
    • The problem is that the cost associated with such services deters use. If a presently pay-per-ride mass transit system were made free, its costs would go up because there'd be more people using it.

      It's easier to roll phone service into tuition to save billing costs because very few college students choose not to use any phone service. Not quite such an easy sell with mass transit and taxes... I don't live within walking distance of a subway system where I sit.
      • If mass transit were actually too cheap to meter, the costs associated with the extra riders would be recovered due to not trying to charge either the existing customers or the new riders. For that matter, if you just don't add more trains, you'll limit the ridership due to crowding instead of cost.

        Mass transit is not actually too cheap to meter, because metering it is pretty cheap, and the constant costs of mass transit are relatively high. Mass transit is actually a different case, where the incremental

      • If a presently pay-per-ride mass transit system were made free

        Well, actually, in Belgium there is a city [hasselt.be] where public transport is free (yes, as in beer) for everybody. Or more correctly, everybody pays, regardless if they use it or not(payed for by taxes).

        The actual cost might have decreased, if you calculate private cost, increased tourism revenu, ... Might make an interesting case study to (dis)prove your point

        • Well, actually, in Belgium there is a city where public transport is free (yes, as in beer) for everybody. Or more correctly, everybody pays, regardless if they use it or not(payed for by taxes).

          Isn't this also the case in the center of Portland or Seattle? One of those rainy cities, anyway.

          • Isn't this also the case in the center of Portland or Seattle? One of those rainy cities, anyway.

            Yes, there is a "free ride" area in Portland that covers most of the central city area.

            Al.
    • I agree with the parent post, but I don't really understand how long distance telco is too cheap to meter. My provider provides all long distance at 3.8 cents/minute, web billing with itemization, credit card required. In other words, it's gotten pretty cheap, and the metering has changed to get cheaper itself, but metering still works. And this company and its many competitors in the low-end LD market, presumably, wouldn't do this if they weren't making money.

      We all know Dartmouth is a very technically
      • We all know Dartmouth is a very technically savvy place, so presumably they could duplicate these results. Or were they charging less per minute of talk? It seems to me that something's odd about the idea that LD telco is too cheap to meter. I applaud the idea of not metering it, which is great social policy for Dartmouth. But I don't really see how it can be an economic gain.

        They didn't say it was costing more to bill than they were taking in, they said (essentially) that billing was the highest cost. Th

      • Re: "Too cheap to meter" (Score:5, Interesting)

        by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:39PM (#7037941)
        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.
    • 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.

      I just payed my last phone bill from EIU about a week ago, to Consolidated Communications actually, not the university. It was $0.21, and they actually bothered to send me a bill! It probably cost them $0.50 - $1.00 to send me the bill. Talk about stupid. It cost me $0.37 for the stamp + about $0.05 for the envelope + about $0.05 for the ch

  • Bandwidth problem (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MigrantHail ( 643728 )
    We use VoIP at my work, and it works pretty well. The only problem we have is that sometime the thing just doesn't respond at first. You have to wait and re-try again later.

  • VoIP DDoS (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:00PM (#7037572) Homepage Journal

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

  • Effect? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by turbotalon ( 592486 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:01PM (#7037579) Homepage
    "What will the success/failure of VoIP on this scale have on telecom?"

    Um, doesn't the telecom industry own much of the data backbone as well? When they quit making money from local service, they start making money on bandwidth.

    Some sort of universal agreement will have to be made with ISP's about badwidth usage so that 1) users can use VoIP all they want without bandwidth caps, and 2) Telecom companies have margin for profit.

    Perhaps per GB unmetered home access at resonable per GB rates?

    Just my $.02

    • Re:Effect? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 )
      When they quit making money from local service, they start making money on bandwidth.
      But that's losing a market with high margins and a high barrier to entry for competitors, while gaining a market with low margins and many competitors already in place.
      It will be a shift of revenue, but it's far from a zero-sum game.

      --
    • "What will the success/failure of VoIP on this scale have on telecom?"

      Um, doesn't the telecom industry own much of the data backbone as well? When they quit making money from local service, they start making money on bandwidth.

      They make a LOT more money selling a retail toll-call voice connection to a consumer than they do from selling the equivalent amount of bandwidth wholesale to an ISP or backbone provider.

      A LOT.

      Like several orders of magnitude.

      Think about it: One phone call, WITHOUT compressio
  • The $50 headsets are being sold at the campus computer store. "But most headsets will work," said Bob Johnson, director of network services at Dartmouth. "It's just a question of what kind of voice quality you want."
    The article I read [com.com] Also it seems that this software is windows only.
    • Whats the big deal about having to buy a headset? They aren't limiting your choice or saying you have to buy theirs.

      Your complaint is like a golf course offering free course usage and you complaining that you have to buy/rent clubs. Usually you pay for both.

      As for software choice, its 3rd party, out of dartmouths hands. And they are working on Pocket PC and Mac versions anyway.
  • "...freshmen can download free software that allows their Windows computers to function as telephones..."
    Jeez. That's a real slap in the face to a lot of mac, linux, etc. users out there. Actually, I'm surprised that similar software isn't out for linux, too. Or maybe it is and the article doesn't mention it. Either way, was inserting the "W" word in there really neccessary?
    • Dartmouth's computer store even reccommends MacOS for the students!
    • No, it wasn't. They probably just meant that Dartmouth was linking to Windows client software, and they never got around to including others because they want to annoy the rest of us.
  • I couldn't find this info anywhere on the link from the college article, but does anyone know how much the hardware for these free calls costs? If it is much more than a typical phone, considering the low cost of long distance / wireless, it could very well never pay off to use the service.

  • It's easier on a campus... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:04PM (#7037611)
    In a college campus situation, a lot of calls are within the campus exchange itself where there's no need for routing it through the PTSN, and plenty of bandwidth available between the buildings.

    When it comes off-campus calls, a lot of those calls are long distance, which can head out over the university's huge bandwidth pipe to the Internet (or maybe even Internet2 or another academic-only network) to a more appropriate entry point into the PTSN to save long distance charges.

    The remainder are local calls which aren't too expensive anyway.

    So, it makes perfect since for schools to boot out the local phone monopoly and provide their own phone service to students. The only downside I see is the high costs of a VoIP phone, but once those start getting mass produced that should drop too.
    • The only downside I see is the high costs of a VoIP phone, but once those start getting mass produced that should drop too.

      They're not using standalone VoIP phones. They're using a VoIP softphone application on the students' (already required) PCs, with a headset plugged into the sound card.

      Buy the "standard" headset for $50 at the campus store or use any old PC headset you've got kicking around for zero added hardware/software cost.

  • quality vs latency (Score:5, Informative)

    by jakedata ( 585566 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:06PM (#7037641)
    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
  • I don't think anyone I know in our dorms has even bothered getting phone service hooked up - cellular is the way of the future...

    Tim
  • Now there's a great idea! Seriously. When I first started out at college, I budgeted around $30/mth for myself in phone bills. That's right, $30/mth because I am from Ohio, and was attending school in Florida. The long distance charges calling a few friends cross-country and my family cross-country can add up QUICK! Especially for a freshman that's in a whole new environment. (Trust me, living amongst so many retiree's is like living amongst a bunch of retarded space-aliens, not that all old people act like

  • "Free" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by psyconaut ( 228947 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:09PM (#7037692)
    So, if I drop $30k/year in schooling costs at Dartmouth, I get free local and long distance calls? Wow. What a deal ;-)

    -psy

  • Free phone service to students* (Score:5, Funny)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:10PM (#7037701)
    Free, with purchase of $150,000 degree program.
    • I also noticed that the article said the IP phones were only available to students with Windows computers. I wonder if a student had their own Mac or linux box and their own IP phone, would they be allowed to use the campus VoIP system? Or is part of their intent to make sure that every student has a Windows box?

      • The college is still largely a Mac campus in the academic departments. Dartmouth cut a sweet discount with Apple in the early 80s, ad was the first school to require students to bring a computer--an Apple computer. The legacy of this is a far-above-average number of Macs around.

        If they aren't going to provide for non-Windows machines, they're going to have angry staff and administrators if they deploy this beyond the students...

  • VOIP question (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zymano ( 581466 )
    I remember there used to be alot of free internet phone VOIP services on the internet but they have all died out and are now charging money. But my question is how do you get your internet call over regular phone lines ? How is it done ?

  • Voip phones, the downside (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Olin 06 ( 629572 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:18PM (#7037774) Homepage
    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.

  • Power Outage (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:21PM (#7037798) Homepage
    But will it work if there is a power outage and you have to call 911?

    Rus
    • If power is out on a major college's campus, police and fire respond automatically anyway. Besides, most colleges have their own backup power systems aside from the main grid.
    • Sure, power the phones with PoE and keep the switching gear on UPS's and/or generators. That's basically how the POTS or PBX systems work anyways, your phone is powered by the voltage supplied from the central office or PBX switch. VoIP phones do suck about 4x as much power as dumb phones but so what?

  • slightly offtopic (Score:2, Interesting)

    by the idoru ( 125059 )
    how do you all pronounce VoIP?

    cause i say it as one word, kind of like poi (the food) but with a P at the end and a V instead of a P at the front. am i insane for doing this?

    course i pronounce gnu as "new" but that's just my own heresy.

  • The billing cost more than the calls. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:26PM (#7037835)
    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.
  • this is absurd... any voip solution needs to NOT be based on a computer with a headset, and needs to be based on a standalone handset solution as the PRIMARY means, perhaps with the computer as an option...

    I can't reboot or turn off my computer while talking on the phone? what if i'm calling for tech support (I know, I know).

    What if there's a blackout? Better be all UPS'd out.

    I can understand the whole billing probelem tho... when I went to college they farmed out the billing and plenty of students jus
    • But the thing is, everyone here carries laptops anyway. We check our email fanatically from everywhere on campus, and often during class. (Unless my advisor's reading this, in which case I don't)

      The rebooting question is tough; I haven't seen that yet. But then, cell phone reception up here is pretty good these days, and there are still POTS phones all over the place for those occasions -- which answers your blackout question too. Of course, this means that we can't go entirely over to VoIP, but I don'
  • I've always been fascinated by the VoIP vs. POTS argument. I doubt the telecoms will lose money in the switch...After all, who owns all of the underground cable? If everything switches to VoIP, the only difference is that more data capacity will be needed as opposed to voice capacity. Not only that, VoIP is the Wild West compared to POTS, which is regulated to hell and back. In a VoIP house, the telecoms kick back, take their money, and only worry about the customers having a solid data connection from
    • In a VoIP house, the telecoms kick back, take their money, and only worry about the customers having a solid data connection from the main office to whatever endpoint the connection is going to.

      That's basically all they do for any major customer. With a PBX system they just provide the T-1 circuit and setup the billing codes, everything else is automated. Basically you can get voice grade SLA's on your data lines, hell our SLA's were better than regulated voice line standards, we always had a telecom engi

      • Re:POTS vs. VoIP? Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by retro128 ( 318602 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @06:26PM (#7038427)
        Technically the T1 you are talking about is a voice circuit. I guess it was a mistake for me to reference POTS instead of voice circuits in my original post, but here's my point: At my company we do it both ways. We have a PRI for voice and a separate Internet feed from Qwest via a T1 point to point link though Verizon. I have some telecommuters on DSL endpoints with Nortel VoIP phones hooked into our network though IPSec tunnels. If those telecommuters are getting crappy voice service, who are they going to call? Me. If I call Verizon and tell them, "hey, my VoIP phones are cutting out, what's the deal?", they will first laugh at me, and then proceed to tell me that the T1 line to Qwest is in perfect condition and it's not their problem.

        If there's a problem with the PRI on the other hand, it's all about them getting it fixed. Now. Whether the problem is with the PRI itself or with the voice circuits. And they have to jump though hoops until the problem is fixed.

        So you see, my point is that VoIP takes a load of responsibility off the telecom's shoulders. All they have to worry about is the phyical connection. Everything else? Your problem.
  • From the NYT article:

    When running, the software appears on the screen as a phone with a dial pad. Phone numbers are dialed by clicking the numbers on the key pad.

    I doubt many people would be so afraid of keyboards that they'd rather use a mouse! I'm guessing that there'd also be a feature where you type or click on a nickname from your personal address book to make a call. I can see softphone in the future working with fake urls, sort of like those aim:// urls that Aim has.

  • Dartmouth Phone System (Score:5, Interesting)

    by querencia ( 625880 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @05:58PM (#7038146)
    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.
  • 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.

    Yeah, pay $36,000 a year and we'll let you talk on the phone for free.

  • No fanboys here (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nsample ( 261457 ) <nsample@sta n f o r d.edu> on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @07:17PM (#7038799) Homepage

    "Separation of concerns" should sink VoIP.

    We have a nice VoIP system in the CS building at Stanford. When routers dump, people now lose the ability to work on their machines and to use the phones. It's an amazing thing to see productivity drop off so dramatically all at once. It used to be that when the power went out, for instance, and it was still light outside, people just shifted gears. They caught up on phone calls, returned voicemails, etc. Now, the world shuts down.

    VoIP would be a great idea if it *didn't* utilize the same networks and have the same power requirements of those same networks. I rue the day I lost my hard PSTN land line. (And I love my cell phone... I'm not speaking as a luddite.)

    Putting all your eggs in one basket may be cheaper, and it may be more efficient for a while, but it sure does suck to lose all services to the next blaster worm to come along...

  • Has anyone tried... (Score:3, Funny)

    by marko123 ( 131635 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2003 @07:55PM (#7039054) Homepage
    ... to connect an acoustic coupler modem to a VOIP connection for 300 baud nostalgia?
  • this is obviously another location where it costs more money for T-Mobile to meter the usage than it does for each Starbucks to install a $50/month DSL connection and a $300 (Cisco, strong and stable, not a POS linksys) base station.

    i would spend money hand over fist if i could go to starbucks and surf. in fact, Starbucks LOSES money from me because i have broadband at home - and don't want to pay for it twice. I often find myself too interested in doing something online than to go up the street and keep

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