Waiting Telephone Applicants May Not Receive Service for Two Months

Busy, social-minded University students who have been patiently waiting for telephones in their rooms or apartments since the end of the war may have to use pay booths for another ten weeks, although B. A. Dwyer, business manager of the Cambridge Branch of the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company announced Friday that his office is doing "everything possible" to shorten the wait of applicants.

"In the past two months, 1,000 stations have been installed" throughout Cambridge, Dwyer said, many of them in-college rooms and in apartments or married students. Although there are still 3300 applications unfilled, Dwyer, deducting a few hundreds who he estimates will no longer need phones when their homes are reached, predicted that everyone will be satisfied by April 1, if not sooner.

"Only one other city in New England has more outstanding requests for phones," Dwyer stated, "and that is Providence." He cited college populations as the reason for Cambridge and Providence not being able to keep up with the demand for the precious instruments. Married students, starting new homes, want more telephones than the limited switchboards and other central equipment can handle.

Non-Veterans Must Walt

As additional equipment is installed in the central offices through which local and long-distance calls are routed, individual instruments will be available immediately, for Dwyer stated that "prewiring is being done now."

Single non-veteran students will still be the last to enjoy the luxury of a private phone, however, as the telephone office has retained the War Production Board's priority system although the official controls were lifted on January 1.