Giving cell phones the ol' college try

Twenty-year-old Meghan Padian, a junior at Morrisville State College, likes keeping in touch with other students, off-campus friends, teachers and her parents.

And she does it using the cell phone that came along with her dorm assignment.

"Five hours a day is typical for me and my friends," Padian says. "If you're talking to a girlfriend, you talk for a while about stuff."

The college, southwest of Syracuse in a hilly, rural stretch of central New York, has just finished issuing updated Nextel phones - Motorola iDen i205 devices with a walkie talkie - to nearly 1,800 students who live on the campus. The only landline connections are a couple of traditional phones in the lobby of each dormitory.

Partly because of the Direct Connect walkie-talkie service offered via Nextel's iDen network, the cell phones seem to have created fast and close bonds among the students.

Padian routinely uses the phone to set up breakfast, lunch and dinner plans with friends or to schedule meetings in the library. Her personal directory has about 70 names.

It adds up to a lot of calling. On a typical week, students rack up about 325,000 cell minutes, and another 75,000 to 100,000 walkie-talkie minutes.

Morrisville set itself apart a year ago by unplugging wired phones in its dorms and issuing cell phones to all residential students. To do so, it struck a creative deal with Nextel Partners, the Kirkland, Wash., cellular provider that serves small and midsize markets over the Nextel Communications network.

The all-cellular plan grew out of the college's embrace of mobile computing and communications technology, says Jean Boland, vice president for IT services. The school introduced IBM ThinkPad notebooks in 1998, and a year later, a campus-wide 2M bit/sec wireless data network based on 802.11 frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum gear from Raylink, a Raytheon spinoff.

One result, Boland says, was that students became nomadic, creating via wireless computing an array of formal and informal teams anywhere, for work and play.

"The next component was mobile communications: being able to stay in touch with whomever you wanted, whenever you wanted," she says. "The landlines just weren't cutting it."

Making a special deal

Boland first talked with two cellular carriers that offered service in the Morrisville area, but neither was interested. Nextel was.

The carrier put together a complete, redundant infrastructure - a cell tower with multiple antennas and repeaters - to blanket the campus, and changed a variety of business practices to accommodate students. One change was its credit requirements, because most students don't have any credit.

"After some trial and error, we came up with a plan for a $50 deposit [by the student]," says Kevin McKenzie, general manager for Nextel Partners' Syracuse market.

Another change was a flexible contract period because students wouldn't be around for a full 12 months.

The college, by contrast, made use of a number of existing practices and procedures, which smoothed the introduction. As with landline fees, the cell phone fees for students are included in the residence hall charges. The new i205 has a vibration feature, so ring tones don't have to interrupt classes or disturb concerts and library sessions. Caller ID is part of the base service.

If students want long-distance, they can select from various Nextel plans, starting at $30 per month. Nextel has shaved a bit off these charges for students, according to the college.