TELECOM Telephones and dorm rooms

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| |I got to be thinking. Today almost all college students have cell |phones. I visited a local college campus recently and was amazed to |see no one was speaking to another human being. They were yacking |into cell phones. Do colleges still need to have land lines in the |dorm rooms?

My daughter has a landline phone in her dorm in a NJ state college. Each student has their own personal dorm phone and number. It rarely gets used. Most comms are text messages on the laptop or cell phone now a days. Far cry from the hall pay phone of yesteryear. Steve

In the 1970s college dorm telephones usually were payphone booths in the hallway for both inward and outward calling. There may also have been a house phone connected to the college PBX.

For college kids of that era, plenty still used the traditional mail to communicate with parents, old friends, lovers, etc since long distance charges, while dropping, were still expensive. When Bell came out with big discounts for direct dialed calls after 11 pm, college kids used it since they were often up at odd hours (of course some roommates were not and didn't appreciated a midnight phone call.)

Newer dorms came with the provision of land lines. Students had to order and pay for the service themselves if they wanted it. Roommates had to work out among each other how to pay the toll charges, sometimes there wasn't always an agreement about who made what call.

A few students who lived in dorms without phones could still order a phone installed, but would have to pay the installation costs as well and of course the monthly bill.

My guess is today most dorm rooms have the option for a land line phone and some do, some don't, depending on the wishes of the students. There are some advantages to land line service.

I asked a parent of a college student and he said they could get landline service but don't have it; their cell phone reception is poor in the room.

My daughter's did, though neither she nor her roommate even remembered the number.

- Ron

My daughter is at Emory-at-Oxford (the old campus of Emory U.) and they would like to go cell-only, but they do not have good cell phone coverage from any carrier, even though they're only about 2 miles from a busy freeway

I e-mailed AT&T asking them to improve their cell coverage, and I got replies from either a computer program or (more likely) a human being trained to act like a computer program. First they gave me a spiel about how to test a defective cell phone. Then they gave me a spiel about how to make a real estate deal with them for a new cell tower. Never did they give any clear indication of understanding my request.

I lived in the neighborhood next to West Harlem Community College (name changed to protect the innocent) in upper Manhattan in the 1970s.

Pretty much anytime I tried making a long distance call from my home between 23:00 and midnight I'd get an "all circuits busy" intercept.

Naturally every time the repair folk checked things out they were either doing it during the daytime or from another location.. so things were fine.

I finally got ahold of someone who put two and two together and realized that the long distance trunks between the local central office (which served my exchange and the college's) and the Long Lines Center were getting maxed out when all the kids called out at 11 pm...

That's only 40 miles outside of Atlanta? I was thinking it was closer to Augusta. I attended college at that "other" institution down the road from you, Georgia Tech.

To keep this telecom related I'll convey a story from the files of the Fulton County Police Department. I was dating a woman in college whose mother had a "car phone". This was 1989 or so (actually the year Georgia passed their seat belt law). She went out to her car to make a call. It was summer so she started the car to run the air conditioner. A couple of minutes later she heard a knock, looked up, and saw the police officer wanting to write her a ticket for operating a motor vehicle without a seat belt. She was idling in a parking lot. The judge later eyed the officer and said, "You obviously have no idea what the intent of this law is do you?" and dismissed it.

I had the same experience with T-Mobile and Verizon. I could stand out in my office parking lot on one of the busiest highways in Austin and have "no signal". I would complain and the best they would do was offer to sell me at full price a new phone. However when the contract expired and I told them why I was canceling they couldn't bend over backwards enough to help me troubleshoot. Nah. We're with Sprint PCS now, works fine.

I can remember in 1971/72 being on limited duty because of an accident while I worked for GTE, they had me working in the business office in West LA, sorting the MARS for the dorms at UCLA, there were hundreds of number just in the dorms. A friend of mine went to Mount St Mary's College in West LA and they had 2 pay phones on each floor of their dorms, one on each end of the floor, real pain to try and talk to someone, but from what I can remember the buildings were built in the 40's

I was an undergrad at Yale from 1971-1975. Dorm phones were part of the university's large Centrex system. If you wanted a phone, you went down to the phone office and signed up for one, billed monthly by SNET, the phone company. There was a special rate which as I recall was slightly cheaper than the normal POTS rate.

At that time, Yale had a remarkably sensible room numbering system that went from 1 to about 3900 for all dorm rooms on campus. If you were in room 1234, your mailing address was 1234 Yale Station, and your campus phone (if you had one) was 2-1234, or from outside

This was back in the era when Ma only let you attach Her phones to Her sacred wiring, but I did my share of informal splices in the basement so people in adjacent rooms could share a phone line. Most rooms had either a phone or an illegal extension, and nobody used the few pay phones for incoming calls.

R's, John

You could always get the new phone, then return it when it worked no better. A fair number of people are getting computers with Vista, finding that a lot of their existing software no longer works, and returning the computer.

Back to dorm rooms, in 1970, we had a phone in each room. It was on a Centrex system that had a step switch on the top floor of the administration building. We could do 4 digit dialing for on campus, then dial 9 for off campus. The phone was included in the room rent, but we (actually, my parents) had to pay long distance.

Harold