<p>why do they tell you to bring one?</p>
<p>In case you want to use one. Don't bring one if you don't want to. You'll survive if you have a cell phone.</p>
<p>You're paying a telephone fee if you live in the dorm. Bring a telephone if you want to use it even though it's pretty much useless when you have a cell.</p>
<p>hahaha gosh. thats what i thought. yea im not bringing one.. thanks guys.</p>
<p>There was already a phone there for us to use last year. We ended up unplugging it and storing it away.I believe my roommate ended up taking it home, though.</p>
<p>Each person is paying ~$70 for phone service so you might as well use it up!</p>
<p>eh?! the phone thing is already charged?</p>
<p>Only real advantage is for 911 calls. (They can find you faster in an emergency if you can't communicate).</p>
<p>There's some law/mandate saying the univ has to provide phones lines to all rooms so it's charged whether or not you use it.</p>
<p>The reason? Cell phones fail in emergencies (ie blackouts and earthquakes). There was a blackout at Stanford Univ yesterday for a couple hours. Cell towers on campus failed and the ones unaffected were overloaded. I kept hearing "all circuits busy, please hang up and try again" even with full reception. Land lines didn't have any connection problems during the outage.</p>
<p>It's come in handy for me on 2 occasions: once (ok more than once) when I forgot to charge my cell phone; and another time when I wanted my mom to call and wake me up for a final. I didn't want to take the chance on sleeping through that!</p>
<p>it's good for emergency situations, or also if you are cheap on minutes and, in the case that you need to make local calls to the 510 area code, you can make all those calls using your dorm phone, as it's free on that.</p>