<p>Cable is free - you just need a coaxial cable to connect the TV to the wall jack. The ITS website also lists all the cable channels (no HBO, etc, but it’s pretty good for basic channels).</p>
<p>[Smith</a> College Information Technology Services](<a href=“http://www.smith.edu/its/services/cable_tv.html]Smith”>http://www.smith.edu/its/services/cable_tv.html)</p>
<p>It says on the site you can use a computer moniter as a TV screen - has anyone tried that?</p>
<p>I assume each room has a telephone plug-in connection. Are telephones already attached to the connections, or do students bring their own land-line phones for this purpose?</p>
<p>Telephones are already there. I remember reading, though I’m not sure if this is still true, that outside phones won’t work.</p>
<p>Smithiegr is correct, you can’t replace the phone in the room and expect it to work, but there are phones in each room, one per person (and they were just put there in January 2005! So much nicer than the ones we had my first semester). The phones have free campus and local calls (making it easy to find people on campus and call for food delivery) and you can easily use a calling card for long-distance calls.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info. Can answering machines be connected to these telephones?</p>
<p>Each telephone comes with it’s own voice-mail service. Though to be honest, I don’t know anyone who uses the telephones in their rooms. The only calls I got on mine all year were from telemarketers.</p>
<p>I used my room phone all the time. To call my parents, to call other people on campus, to interview for internships, to call for delivery, etc. And I know other people used it too, because my number was listed for the wrong person on the directory my senior year and I’d get calls for her. :)</p>
<p>I used my room phone a lot too. Mostly because I got a lot of phone calls from other people in my orgs or from professors or from my work study job and it’s a lot easier for people on campus to look up your room extension in the online directory then try to get everyone to remember your own number. </p>
<p>A lot of people do forget to set up their in room voicemail boxes, but I recommend this highly.</p>