Phone Office To Stop Billing Students

After a lengthy evaluation of the quality of telephone services on campus, the Harvard Student Telephone Office announced yesterday that it will offer undergraduates free phone service next year.

This means students will be able to make local, University and 800-number calls at no cost next year—the College will foot the bill. In following years, these fees will be included as part of tuition.

“If this plan works out and continues it will become part of the room rate, which is what most schools do,” said Director of Telecommunications Nancy Kinchla.

The new plan will also extend the area encompassed under the local calling plan, which currently only covers Cambridge and towns touching it, Kinchla said.

In addition, outside telephone company Paetec will likely provide long distance and take care of billing for these calls, Kinchla said. Both responsibilities currently belong to the Harvard Student Telephone Office.

Ironically, this decision by the student telephone office will likely result in its dissolution since Paetec will assume many of the office’s duties, said Undergraduate Council member Shira S. Simon ’04, who helped Kinchla formulate a plan for the future of Harvard’s telephone services.

Paetec, a telecommunications firm that works with colleges, businesses and hospitals, is expected to offer lower long distance rates than the current ones and to offer students more payment options.

“Since they are covering thousands and thousands of people, their costs are much less,” Kinchla said. “They will offer many different types of payment plans, and they’ll offer online billing payment as well.”

The changes come after the student telephone office spent months re-examining the status of the office and its role on campus after it had financial troubles.

These are also partly sparked by the increased popularity of cell phones, especially for long distance calls, Kinchla said.

“Kids are going to continue to use cell phones on campus, but with most cell phones, using it to make local calling is very expensive, so I think providing local service is where we should be.”

Kinchla met with Simon and other members of the council three months ago and began discussing, among other things, whether campus phone services should even exist.

“We originally talked to the Student Life Committee of the [council] and spoke to them about whether it would be a big deal if we got rid of the phone service,” Kinchla said.

“We talked about how students were frustrated with the phone company, and [Kinchla] talked about how the phone company was going bankrupt anyway because of billing problems and people not paying bills, and we started brainstorming about what we wanted to do,” Simon said.

Despite the telephone office’s financial difficulties, Kinchla and the council members decided that telephone access must still exist in undergraduate rooms, partially for safety reasons.

—Staff writer Joseph P. Flood can be reached at flood@fas.harvard.edu.