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Last Words
Marshall U. Plans to Offer Cellphones, Not Traditional Phones, in 4 New Dormitories
By Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education
19/03/2003
When students move into Marshall University's new dormitories this fall, their room phones won't hang on the wall or sit on a bedside table. The students will carry the phones in their pockets.
The university is one of a handful of institutions that will assign cellular phones to students in lieu of land lines. Ed Grose, vice president for university operations at Marshall, says that during the construction of four new residence halls he noticed ubiquitous advertisements for cellphone providers and their frenzied competition for customers. He figured that he could use that competition to get a good deal on phone service in the new buildings.
Through their residence fees, about 500 students will pay $30 each per month for cellphones and service, including unlimited local and long-distance calls. However, the students will have to pay extra for voice mail and won't be able to use the phones when they're more than about 30 miles from the campus, in Huntington, W.Va. The students will get the cellphones from the university even if they already have their own, and they will have to give the phones back to the university at the end of the year.
The program is an experiment. "It will be interesting to see how successful it is," Mr. Grose says. "We have tested all of the area, and we have real strong signals, so we don't anticipate a problem." Nevertheless, the residence halls will be wired for land-line phones and, of course, the Internet.
If students like the cellphones, Marshall's contract with West Virginia Wireless allows the university to add more students to the program next year. But Mr. Grose says that the land lines in existing residence halls help pay for phone service on the rest of the campus, so eliminating that service in favor of cellphones would hurt the university's budget.
Marshall is not the only institution striking deals with wireless phone companies. The New Jersey Institute of Technology, which does not offer phone service in its residence halls, is reviewing bids from four companies for cellphone service for its students.
"We're motivated by a desire to improve communication on campus -- the possibility of students' being able to easily communicate with each other and with us," says Jack Gentul, the dean of students. He says that wireless phone service on the campus, in Newark, might also allow the institute to adopt new technology more easily in the future, such as cellphones that are also personal digital assistants. PDA phones are expensive right now, but "it won't be long before the pricing comes down and everyone is using them, and we see a lot of potential there for administrative convenience."
However, Mr. Gentul says that setting up cellphone service on the campus poses challenges. "This was not an easy thing to accomplish with vendors because it is not the cookie-cutter plan that most vendors have. This required some out-of-the-box thinking."
For example, how should the institute deal with student billing, service, and repairs? "We don't want to become the phone company," Mr. Gentul says, adding that transactions will mainly occur directly between the students and the cellphone-service providers. That's different from how many corporations provide cellphones for their employees. "Usually, the company takes care of the bill," he says, "and you work with your financial people to figure out who pays for it."
Also, many students already come to the campus with a cellphone and a service contract -- one that sometimes extends for two years. "We're struggling with that issue," Mr. Gentul says.
Ultimately, he says, "before we make a final decision, we are going to take it to our resident students."
Thomas A. Reid, director of communication-network services at Ohio University at Athens, says that he, too, has looked at setting up cellphone service, but serious considerations stopped him.
The most attractive feature of cellphones, their mobility, could become a headache or a liability, he says. "Let's say I want to call a residence-hall room because there is a noise complaint," he says. "How do you reach that room specifically?" And, he adds, he has to consider students' safety: Emergency services can find the address of a land-line phone that has been used to call 911, but that's not the case with a cellphone. "The odds of [that location information's] becoming critical are not great, but that's a big risk to take."
He also doubts that a single cellphone company can accommodate intense usage in a small geographic area, like a campus. During peak hours, he says, students might have trouble getting a signal -- a phenomenon known as "frequency saturation."
Over the years, Ohio University has invested millions in land-line equipment, which could work efficiently for another decade. Mr. Reid recently called Marshall University, curious to learn the details of its cellphone program. But he doubts that Ohio will adopt one like it -- at least not in the near future.
"But clearly," he says, "the students' march to cellphones is not going to change. How long there needs to be a wired component is the question."
Read the full article at The Chronicle of Higher Education
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