IN OTHER NEWS:
New core proposal approved by full faculty vote, delayed until 2001

False scholarship letters dash student hopes

Longtime discussion on faculty Christian school requirement reignited

CAS department proposes CVN, WCAL takeover

Honors convocation makes changes, benefits students

WCAL survey results

photo by VanderKlippe According to Bob Myers, the director of network and communication services, “It is a puzzle in balancing the phone rates.”

Bob Myers drops a box the size of an unabridged Webster’s dictionary on his desk with a solid thud. Inside are almost 1,200 double-sided sheets of paper.

What’s on the paper? Calvin’s long-distance bill for the month of March — all $15,000 of it.

Long distance rates have long been a point of contention among on-campus Calvin students. For example, John Lazarus, a student from India, said, “I used to make a lot of long distance phone calls but I was tired of the damage it was doing to my wallet. I now limit my calls and instead use other means of communication.”

In an attempt to alleviate some of these high phone bills for international students, the Calvin Telecommunications Department has dropped rates on international calls by 10 percent.

Myers, the director of network and communication services, recognizes that the rates are high for students: “I know there are issues about our long distance rates and I know they are high. We are working on that.”

The difficulty, he explains, is that the Telecommunications Department at Calvin is what is known as a “zero-based budget department.” This means that no money is set aside for the department. Rather, all maintenance expenses and the salaries of the two staff are paid by money received from long distance bills.

Calvin also receives business rates, which are higher than residential rates, for all of its phone calls, as the institution is officially recognized as a business.

Calvin’s classification as a business also means that charges are incurred for every local call that is made.

According to Myers, Calvin is charged $15,000 per month on local calls alone, calls which cost the institution 10 cents a piece. Students are not charged for these calls, meaning that no money comes in directly to cover the thousands of dollars in local telephone fees every month. This in turn means that the long distance bills must also cover the local calling. “The only way I can recoup those charges,” says Myers, “is through long-distance rates.”

Adding further to the equation is the system by which students are charged for their long distance calling. Phone calls are routed through a telephone server, which records the geographical location and duration of the call. This information is then forwarded to what is known as the MATCH file server. The server then matches up the call information with the standard published AT&T business rates, which are updated every month.

Domestic long distance rates had already been discounted 10 percent for some time, says Myers, but somehow international rates got overlooked. While doing some training on the MATCH system in January, he discovered the discrepancy and immediately discounted the 10 percent from international calls.

Part of the problem stems from the implementation of the new telephone system on campus as well as a change in billing procedure: Before this year, phone billing was done through Campus Safety.

Myers says that there is a possibility of the dorms switching to residential rates, but that remains to be worked out. In the meantime, “we’re trying to balance this thing out to get competitive rates and maintain a zero-based budget,” Myers said.