After mounting protest from a handful of angry students, officials at a South Carolina university have decided to unblock student computer access to a Web site that offers free long distance telephone service.
The decision comes one week after Clemson University officials suddenly blocked access to Dialpad, citing bandwidth and financial concerns.
It didn't take long before students started complaining.
In an article published in the student paper The Tiger, reporter Rob Barnett questioned whether the decision to block Dialpad was linked to Clemson's Office of Telecommunications, which offers its own long-distance service to its 16,400 students.
Student posts on the university's newsgroup called the school's policy censorship, and more than one person accused the school of trying to run a monopoly on long distance phone service.
"My main impression was that the university did this because of fear of lost revenues. My thought now is, why don't they block the sites of other universities?" wrote Jason Blondin. "The way things are going here I just might want to leave."
In a student poll posted on the newspaper's Web site, 83 percent of the students who responded said the university should not be able to block Dialpad.
"How can we allow our "Big Brother" university dictate what we can and cannot do on the Web?" one student asked. "I just recently heard about Dialpad and was going to try it out."
Christopher Duckenfield, the vice provost for computing and information technology, said it's not too late: The site was unblocked Monday morning.
"We simply wanted a few days to think about it," he said. "We didn’t understand it."
Dialpad is one of several new PC-to-phone services that is simple to use and totally free. The sound isn't perfect, but the price is right and it's a natural choice for students trying to save their money for basics like books and beer.
Dialpad communications VP Peter Hewitt said he was surprised about the school's decision to temporarily block the service. The only other case of blocking he had heard of was in India, where the government collects a tariff on each phone call, he said.
"It is a monumental new communication method that college students all over the country are using in droves," he said. "It's perfect -- many college campuses are networked on LANs and college kids don't have a lot of money."
Clemson students make up only a tiny percentage of the San Jose-based company's 2.5 million users who have signed on since its October launch. Hewitt says about 15 percent of those users are college students.
Duckenfield denies that the university was trying to monopolize the long distance service its students use, and says Clemson's long distance service -- Clemson Telecommunications -- is not a significant source of income for the university in the first place.
"The whole telecommunications industry has been turned on its head," he said. "There's so much competition, it's 10 cents a minute today, 7 cents a minute tomorrow, 5 cents a minute next."
"It's not that we're afraid of losing revenues," he said. "It's what shifting of budgets has to take place in the university. [Using Dialpad] has a ripple effect -– some adjustments might have to be made. We're set up right now to support an old-fashioned system."
Hewitt says such concerns are easily addressed.
"What he ought to do is re-evaluate his technical requirements to improve network access," he said.
