Mandatory phone bills dropped

Thanks to some calls from the Undergraduate Assembly, living on-campus is now $60 cheaper per year. Starting this fall, landline phones are optional for those living in a college house.

In the past, all students living in on-campus housing were automatically charged $30 per semester for the use of a landline phone in each room, regardless of whether the phone was used.

As of last semester, about 4,200 landline phones were installed for 7,100 residential students, according to Information Systems and Computing Networking and Telecommunications Associate Vice President Mike Palladino.

However, by fall semester of 2010, nearly 100 percent of students will have cell phones, Palladino wrote in an e-mail.

Despite the almost exclusive use of cell phones by college students in recent years, residential phones remained on campus for their use in emergency situations.

Over 1,000 calls to Penn Police were made from campus landlines last year, from which Public Safety was able to identify the exact location — yet, 75 to 80 percent of students never use their landline phone privileges at all, according to Palladino.

In three years of living in dorms, rising College senior and Undergraduate Assembly member Emerson Brooking never once even plugged in his Penn-provided phone.

After a meeting with Palladino in December, Brooking, a former columnist for The Daily Pennsylvanian, said he collected information about student’s phone use.

“Students, as transitory residents, don’t have a lot of time to become acclimated to these services or find out how they work,” Brooking said.

He added, “I was able to learn a lot just by asking the right questions.”

Brooking used the information to work with ISC and the Department of Public Safety to put an end to the required fee.

“Sixty dollars is real savings for students,” Brooking said. “This was a student victory.”

However, for students who opt-in all local and emergency calls will still be free.

The fee will also continue to give each student a Traveling Authorization Code, a personalized number that can be used to unlock any campus phone for long distance calling.

Now that ISC will no longer “buy in bulk,” students who opt to pay for access to a landline phone — of whom Brooking predicts there will not be many — will pay $16.50 a month according to Palladino.

He explained that the ISC does not make a profit but breaks even from the charges to students.

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