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If you're on the Dartmouth campus, phone calls are on the house: Dartmouth stopped billing for phone calls originating on its network as of July 1.
No more dialing "8" for personal calls, no more haggling with roommates and Telephone Services staff about who made that two hour call to Auckland. Telephone service is now a utility: always on, with no user chargebacks and plenty of capacity.
The changes are one of several that are just starting to be implemented in Dartmouth's telecommunications infrastructure, including the convergence of the telephone and Cable TV networks into the recently upgraded data network.
However, the demise of the DarTalk bill is the most likely to be talked about. It's being studied by administrators at other schools, and was mentioned in an August article in The New York Times.
What made the change possible is simple economics, according to Associate Director of Technical Services, Bob Johnson: Dartmouth can't afford to bill for phone calls anymore.
- Long-distance rates have plunged in recent years. Large institutions, such as Dartmouth, can buy calling time for less than two cents per minute.
- Call volumes are dropping. Cell phones, calling cards, and alternatives to telephones, such as e-mail, mean fewer calls are being placed through the telephone system.
- Billing for phone calls costs money. The fixed-cost overhead for billing operations - computers, software, and staff - was traditionally paid for with a small per-minute surcharge. As rates and volume dropped, the small surcharge started looking larger and larger.
With the College's current financial squeeze, the changes provide more than just savings to the bottom line, Johnson said. "Think about the time spent sorting out a $1.52 charge that might delay someone's graduation. Or all the effort that people put into figuring out phone bills in academic departments. Sorting out personal from grant-funded from whatever ... People used to spend a lot of time on this stuff, and that is now history."
Before dropping the billing operation, Johnson and his staff tested what would happen in a sorority. Call volumes spiked briefly when the charges were lifted, but they quickly fell back to within 15 percent of pre-test levels. Johnson thinks a similar pattern will occur this fall after students return for classes.
To insulate against financial risk, Johnson renegotiated contracts with carriers to insure that Dartmouth has flexibility of terms no matter what direction rates and call volumes take in the future. The flexibility comes not only from dealing in a competitive marketplace: Dartmouth has formed a regional telecom buyers consortium that allows its members access to ever-dropping rates with little or no long-term commitments.
The other risk regards capacity: If volumes increase, can our local network keep up? Johnson says yes, thanks to the development of a reserve account that anticipates future network upgrades. An upgrade completed earlier this year delivered gigabit capacity and support for a range of upcoming new services that are still in development, including Voice over IP - telephones and data traveling across the same wires and using the same underlying language.
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