Back in the college dorm, over ten years ago now, we signed up every year for phone service for our rooms. It was the same as getting residential phone service. We’d pick a plan, typically a flat fee for unlimited local calling (used primarily for calling your friends one floor up to see if they were ready to eat) and a long distance provider. Every year we paid the phone company an annoyingly large setup fee, even though they did little to reconnect service (which was made all too clear by the fact that a room kept the same phone number year after year). Soon after I graduated, the college installed its own campus phone service, the same kind of system that companies purchase. It came with voicemail and students could forward calls to other rooms, conference call, all those fun things people do with their office phone if they can remember the key combinations.

Nowadays I assume many college students get cell phones and don’t bother with land lines no matter who supplies them. But then there’s Darthmouth, always on the cutting edge of campus networking. They merged their data and phone networks and rolled out phone service over campus-networked and wireless computers using voice over IP. Long distance calls are free. Traditional phones remain in the dorms, for now, and its likely that many students will prefer their cell phones as their primary phone. But as cellphones and wireless computers merge, who will own the line in the future?