Colleges' Land Lines Nearing Silent End.
The Washington Post
reports that across the country, wired phones are becoming obsolete in
colleges. Although not many colleges have eliminated them, “almost
every major school is evaluating it,” said Jeri Semer, executive
director of the Association for Communications Technology Professionals
in Higher Education.
This transformation of campus culture — cell
phones keeping students closely tied to friends and family, making
social life fluid, even intruding on professors' lectures — also poses
a financial challenge for administrators. Land-line phones used to
bring in money for many schools. Now some find themselves paying to
maintain systems that students rarely use.[…] Five years ago, the school made hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year on long-distance service, said Carl Whitman, executive
director of the Office of Information Technology. Last semester, the
school made $1,109.”
Related:
— Hotels lose money to cell phones
– Cellphones have taken a huge bite out of their earnings. Thanks
largely to the preponderance of portables, the profits from in-room
phones dropped 76 percent.