There are certain things students on a college campus need for their daily lives, like food, shelter, electricity, heating and-- at least at Dartmouth --e-mail. For convenience, Dartmouth, like many other colleges, provides many of these to its students, and in fact it does a decent job with most of them.
For example, though expensive and repetitive, Thayer food is still good compared to other schools', most dorms are relatively nice places to live, and BlitzMail is cool. Overall, we have things pretty good here; in many ways, Dartmouth has gone to great lengths to make life more convenient for us.
But the convenience and ingenuity of most aspects of Dartmouth are notably absent in the case of DarTalk. While the rest of Dartmouth has made great strides towards the 21st century, its phone service has barely even left the 19th. This weak point is baffling: if I can send a 10,000-page paper to my professor in nanoseconds for free, why am I charged $15 a month to not even consistently be able to complete a simple phone call? It can't be that difficult to simply make sure there are enough phone lines for all the calls that are attempted. But then, even when I do get through, the reception is terrible.
At any given time, I can pick up a phone and hear eight different conversations in the background -- often more clearly than the person I am actually calling. And if I misdial, or if there simply isn't a free line to take my call, I get an obnoxious, eardrum-damaging siren, and after that, I have to wait for the phone to reset itself.
Annoyingly, even though each student has his or her own personal access code, DarTalk still doesn't let us make calls from rooms other than our own. I mean, this shouldn't be too high-tech for DarTalk; other schools have done it for years -- while charging less, I might add.
Also, DarTalk uses the same Declining Balance Account system as DDS and other college services, but inexplicably it alone does not allow us to charge to our accounts. In fact, it doesn't even trust us to pay our bills but instead demands the money up front. Dartmouth trusts us to charge snacks, tickets, fees and even a whole term's food to our ID's, and every other phone company in the world trusts its customers to pay their bills after making calls. So why is DarTalk so afraid that students will flee the country with unpaid phone bills?
And the bills DarTalk sends us are cryptic; they don't tell us directly how much we should pay, how much we've spent, or even whether we are about to be cut off. Instead, they tell us how much of our original deposits we have spent, and how much we would have to pay to get back to that original amount, as if that were important. Most of us have no idea how much those freshman-year deposits were, but DarTalk does not bother to tell us.
So we are left knowing that we have spent X dollars out of a deposit of Y dollars, but we don't know Y, we only know that if Y-X is less than zero, we will soon be "deactivated."
But the problem with Dartalk isn't just that it sucks; we all pretty much knew that the first time we tried to use the phone and were unexpectedly rejected. No, like everything else in Hanover, Dartalk survives because it has a monopoly. For all practical purposes, without DarTalk you can't have real phone service in your room; all you'd have is the equivalent of an in-house phone.
There is no reason why everybody who lives in a dorm and wants to be able to make outside calls from their room should have to pay DarTalk's $15 a month service charge just for the "privilege" of a functioning phone jack. Other schools and phone companies charge little or nothing for that.
Dartmouth may be remote, but this is 1994, and New Hampshire does have phone companies -- some of which, I am sure, would love to offer us service for less than DarTalk. Even putting one of those payphones in each room would be better than DarTalk.
DarTalk defends itself by claiming in its information brochure that its "ownership of the system allows us the opportunity to give you such service as same day activation of service (excluding registration week) and detailed toll billing." But every long distance company I know of has the same kind of billing (except they actually bill you instead of telling you how much they've taken from your DBA), and same-day activation is pretty useless if you can't get it during registration week -- the only time most students would need it. Anyway, being re-activated wouldn't be so important if DarTalk's own strict, confusing DBA system didn't make it so easy to get deactivated in the first place.
However, there is hope. This summer, there was a bit of good news: DarTalk is finally revamping its system, which will be capable of using more lines, and less susceptible to cross-talk. Hopefully, this will improve some of the flaws in the system; but it probably won't do a whole lot. A better solution would be to dump the DarTalk middleman and just get regular phone service like everybody else. Maybe EBA's won't be able to identify us as quickly, but at least our phones will work.
