<p>I was wondering what are the local exchanges for Swarthmore, besides 328? The cell phone co is having a hard time figuring it out (what exchanges would be local for dialing at Swarthmore, within the 610 area code?) Thanks so much.</p>
<p>our d. at swat has a cell phone in the 610 area code. Her cell phone number begins with 513.</p>
<p>Her dorm room phone begins with 690 but I don't think she used it much! lol.</p>
<p>There's rumor that they're getting rid of the in-room telephone. Maybe it is more than just rumor.</p>
<p>I thought they were keeping the in-room telephones and have gotten rid of free long-distance calls.</p>
<p>Thanks for the information. We are trying a cell number that Verizon thinks will work, and if not, will try another! </p>
<p>The initial information from Swarthmore assigns phone numbers for in room phones, but does not mention anything about long distance dialing that I can see.</p>
<p>Do they have to bring their own ground telephones, or are these in the rooms?</p>
<p>Each room will come with two phones. There was some talk about changing the phone system to remove the in-room phones, but I think that they would have notified us if they'd actually gone through with it.</p>
<p>All the info about proposed changes to the current phone plan are here:
<a href="http://www.swarthmore.edu/its/news/eeitems/168%5B/url%5D">http://www.swarthmore.edu/its/news/eeitems/168</a></p>
<p>Nothing has been decided yet, as far as I know.</p>
<p>the above referenced article referred to 2 wireless companies installing new towers to enhance cell phone usage from inside the dorms. Any ideas which these were? Does Verizon work OK there? Where we live (up in the mountains), Verizon is the only one that works well, so we just went through a big switch, but he can change again!</p>
<p>My daughter had a pretty good reception with Cingular (even inside the dorms).</p>
<p>My son has Verizon. On a very few occasions he had reception problems, but he could usually find a location where reception was fine. He just needed to be careful of roaming charges.....for some strange reason, his calls were usually picked up by a Verizon tower in Phila, but 2 or 3 times, he got slammed with roaming charges when his call (from the same location on campus) was picked up by a different company's tower in NJ. Verizon was good about removing the charges the first time, and he just had to be careful after that. Since we've got a family plan, we went with Verizon because it works best at home.</p>
<p>The ITS people said that of a poll given to students, about 80% of students had cell phones. Of that 80%, the best service was supposedly Cingular, and the worst Verizon. I have Verizon, and I've very often been randomly disconnected in the middle of a call... several times.</p>
<p>However I've heard a bunch of cinglar people complaining about their service...</p>
<p>Hard to beat Cingular GSM, I think. There are no roaming charges anywhere within the network (i.e. no roaming 4 months student is home, or at least presumably away from Swarthmore). S did have to have to remove to Willets 3 stairwell to get a reliable signal Friday night, however.</p>