As someone who has just set up VoIP phone equipment (using sipgate.co.uk), basically it's made land lines as good as dead, to my mind - so long as you can guarantee the quality of service needed for those VoIP calls. I should imagine that is possible for a lot less than $25 per room, though! If the University wanted to be *really* clever, they could install a VoIP-powered ISDN PABX, and install ISDN phones in students rooms. That would be pretty much idiot-proof, too...

I don't like mobile phones - they're still too expensive, and if the OpCos are not extremely careful, they might just find people pulling out their SIM cards and using a phone configured for VoIP over WLAN. After all, if you don't need it absolutely *everywhere*, why use GSM in the first place? My next mobile phone will be a Nokia E51, and I will be using it *primarily* for VoIP.

Seriously? They were paying $25 for a line for each and every student? They didn't just have a small bank of lines and a block of numbers allocated and a switchboad?
FFS. Academics.