College Dorms Cut the Cord but Some Lines Will Stay

Several Indiana colleges, including University of Indianapolis, Hanover, Indiana Tech, Indiana Wesleyan, Butler and Indiana State, are pulling the plug. Students can still choose to have landlines activated but the schools said they suspect very few will. The universities of Virginia and South Dakota recently said they were making similar moves. University of Virginia officials said they could save $500,000 a year by removing the 3,850 phones in student dorms.

American University in Washington has already removed landline phones from rooms in the residence halls, a spokeswoman said. The school still maintains a “courtesy phone” on each dorm floor as well as one at the front desk, she said. These landline hall phones are used as backups and for emergencies, she said. American University has its own Wi-Fi (802.11n) for data and cell antennas across the campus. It also has in-building antennas from Mobile Access for cellphones, she said. At any given time on campus more than 4,000 people are logged into wireless, she noted. “Some students never ever plug into the wall and just live on wireless.”

The George Washington University significantly reduced the number of student voice lines in residence halls two years ago, a spokesman for the Washington school said. It kept some lines as a precaution for access to emergency numbers, he said.

Some schools are sticking with the cord even with full wireless coverage on campus. Virginia Tech plans to leave wired telephones in residence halls for the foreseeable future, a spokesman said. “They're in and working and we know that in extremely high call-volume situations, mobile telephone service alone doesn’t have the capacity to carry the load.” The school’s wireless network (802.11g and increasingly, 802.11a) covers 95 percent of academic and administrative buildings and is in select common areas in various residential halls, he said.

Even GWU, which only keeps a small number of landlines, doesn’t plan to discontinue wired network services, the spokesman said. The school’s wireless networks cover all three campuses but wireless networks continue to be slower than wired and with the requirements for both high-speed networks being fast and accessible, both systems are needed, he said. The school has an 802.11G (11 Mbps) wireless network and is deploying an 802.11N (54 Mbps) wireless network, he said.

Princeton University manages its own telephone service and the infrastructure for landlines is already in place, a spokeswoman said. There are about as many landlines as there are students living in university dorm rooms, she said. There are a total of some 5,000 undergraduates and 98 percent of undergraduates live in campus housing, she said.

Though usage is small, Boston University still keeps landlines at residence halls and has no plan to cut the cord anytime soon, a spokesman said. Purdue still has landlines and some students do use them, a spokeswoman said. Its newest residence hall, which opened in 2009, has an active hardwired phone line in each common room. “Service is available in each room, but they are inactive unless a resident requests to use them,” she said.

University of Indiana’s residence halls still have active phone lines as part of a bundle of services but the school has explored doing away with the lines starting in 2011, said Patrick Connor, director of residential programs and services. He expects savings from the elimination of landlines to be relatively small. If the school did away with landlines, it would still offer the option for students to have landlines in their dorms at request and/or have a public phone on each residence hall floor, he said. The university manages its own wireless networks and residence halls are fully covered by wired and wireless networks, Connor said. AT&T provides discount service to IU students and employees through “a preferred provider relationship,” he said.

Many universities use a multi-layered emergency alert system. American University’s system includes the “personal layer” through text messaging, e-mail, voice mails primarily using Rave Wireless technology, a facilities-based layer via “Fire alarms,” “AlertUs Beacons,” telephones in classrooms, the spokeswoman said. Coming soon are TV monitor display screens in more than 40 campus locations. The “outdoor layer” has notifications from patrol officers, building managers and soon loudspeakers attached to blue-light phones, the spokeswoman said. Rave Wireless also provides an opt-in monitoring service with GPS capabilities to increase student safety, she said.

University of Indiana’s emergency alert system sends messages through live broadcast, e-mails and text messages, Connor said. GWU’s emergency communications are multifaceted, layered systems that aren’t dependent on a single delivery method or type of technology, the spokesman said. In addition to Web-based, landline-based and wireless-based systems, he said the school also uses social media networks like Facebook and Twitter for distribution of information.