Undergraduate Council work helps lower phone rates

This is the era of the long-distance rate war. Flipping channels on an average night of television viewing, it seems the ads are everywhere, each offering a different plan and a different great deal. In fields, across the Golden Gate, and in the streets of Manhattan, giant coins rumble through the landscape announcing the deals.

Some of those coins rolled back into Harvard students' pockets last week as a committee of Undergraduate Council members and University Information Systems (UIS) officials announced a new rate plan for Harvard long distance, cutting the flat-rate plan by three cents a minute and lowering other rates as well as creating a new 8-cents-anytime plan with a $5.95 monthly fee.

Other changes included lower international rates. However, the rate to Canada still remains high, so not all countries are affected. The local-use base rate on each line, a subject of student complaint, was also not lowered. UIS officials say that costs from a recent upgrade of phone and data lines on campus prevent them from lowering base rates at this time.

We welcome the lower rates as an important way to help Harvard's geographically far-flung student body keep in touch with people at home, but we also know that the highly competitive phone market can still do us better. If these were Cambridge apartments, we could choose phone service directly from the carriers and find one among the tens of plans that best fit us. The interrelated Harvard phone network could never create completely independent accounts for us, but there is still room for further competition and lower rates for Harvard phones.

We laud the council's efforts to work with the administration in addressing an important student issue. With further cooperation, perhaps these lower rates can be achieved. In the meantime, we will be happy with a few more cents in our pockets.