Emerson Parker wrote:
All,
I'm interested in learning more about what universities are doing in
terms of chargeback to students for wireless services.
Are universities looking to recapture some of the infrastructure
expenses? Is there a real revenue loss from students declining
traditional voice services in favor of personal cell phones or did
that happen a long time ago?
With regards to the cell phones, there definitely is a real revenue
loss, and while I wouldn't say it happened "a long time ago", it's
certainly not a new thing. My university's IT department apparently used
to make a couple million dollars a year reselling long-distance service;
they're making a fraction of that now. The /tricky/ part for them,
however, has been that the way that students no longer even bother to
hook up phones in their room for the university's on-campus telephone
service. This makes getting in touch with students difficult when they
need to make an urgent announcement of some sort, and it's also more
difficult for a professor to get in touch with their students: suddenly
it's a long-distance phone call. But I digress.
As for wireless services, I think that mostly came out of the
general-purpose 'tuition' category; campus-wide wireless coverage has
been touted as one of the features of the university's features for
prospective students (along with its laptop program). Tuition was high
enough, and the marginal cost of the wireless program small enough, that
it didn't affect that figure too much. I suspect it's generally easier
to hide the cost in there than to attempt to extract the cost into a
separate sort of fee structure.
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