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Telecommunications: The Next Legacy?
8/22/2005
As universities discover the benefits of wireless, telephone systems just might become yesterday’s news.
EXTINCTION IS A WELL-DOCUMENTED phenomenon occurring frequently on this planet; everything from the dinosaurs to the dodo bird have seen the end of the line. In the world of technology, extinction is both frequent and forced. Whether it’s the mainframe computer or floppy disks, many former staples of college computing are now relegated to museums and the personal collections of technology historians.
As both cellular telephones and VoIP (voice over the Internet protocol) become more affordable, traditional telephone systems just might be next to join the dusty shelves of history. And nowhere is the impending end of the traditional telephone line felt more acutely than in academia. For years, colleges and universities have offered Centrex-driven, hard-line telephone jacks in campus dormitories and have earned big bucks selling long-distance services to students who use them. Now, however, as more and more students are turning to cell phones for their communication needs, some schools are reconsidering their telephone policies altogether.
At Wake Forest University (NC), technologists recently launched a pilot program to determine how best to phase out traditional land lines and move students to a mandatory wireless plan. “I never thought I’d see the day when telephones became legacy systems, but for us, it might not be that far off,” says Jay Dominick, assistant VP for Information Systems. “Keeping telephone systems just d'esn’t make sense for us anymore, so in a sense, we’re simply adjusting to reality.”
Communication Breakdown
As Dominick implies, the writing certainly is on the wall. In September 2004, he and his colleagues received a number of loud complaints from faculty members about the inability to get in touch with their students. After a brief investigation, Dominick’s team discovered that faculty members were calling students on dorm phones, and leaving voicemail messages that were never retrieved. In January 2005, Dominick’s crew set out to crunch some numbers about voicemail usage, or the lack thereof, on the campus telephone network. The results were staggering. Of 1,985 mailboxes: 14.9 percent hadn’t been accessed in 30 to 50 days. 10.8 percent hadn’t been accessed in 51 to 100 days. 7.5 percent hadn’t been accessed in 101 to 200 days. 24.9 percent had never been accessed at all. Remarkably, more than 58 percent of campus voicemail hadn’t been accessed at all in the 30 days prior to the study. With campus voicemail as the university’s primary method of communicating emergency information, Dominick knew he had to respond to this alarming trend quickly.
However, instead of fighting the student movement away from telephones, he embraced it. Recognizing that students were eschewing their dorm phones for cellular ones, Dominick lined up three cellphone companies, Cingular (www.cingular.com), Verizon (
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