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August 15, 1996 CONTACT: NYNEX New England: Betsy Bottino Arenella, 617/743-3677 New York:Cliff Lee, 518/396-1095 CONTROLLING THOSE CRAZY COLLEGE PHONE BILLS New Service Gives Each Student An Individual Bill, Lets Parents Impose A Cap BOSTON--Aug. 15, 1996--College students haggling over dorm room phone bills ("Who called Seattle for 240 minutes?!") and parents wishing for a way to control their children's calling soon may be problems of the past. SUNY Buffalo and Regis College in Weston, Mass., are among the first schools to take advantage of services from NYNEX and Telesoft Corp. that provide each student with an individual Personal Identification Number (PIN) for billing and allow parents to impose a threshold on the student's phone chats. A cooperative effort by NYNEX and Phoenix-based Telesoft Corp., Campus Services offers colleges and universities a telephone system and individual billing for students. NYNEX provides the school with Digital Centrex Service, a telephone system whose equipment is housed in NYNEX's switching centers. Centrex offers capabilities including voice messaging, call transfer and call forwarding. Telesoft activates and deactivates PINs and bills the students for their telephone service. Telesoft also will monitor student usage to help protect against fraud and provide a free student help line available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "With Campus Services, students never have to worry about dividing their phone bills among roommates or suitemates, because every student receives an individual monthly bill," said Russ Kohn, NYNEX director of applications development. When calling off-campus, outside the Centrex, students must punch in their PIN. Students also can make calls from anywhere in the U.S. using a Telesoft access code and their PIN. Since students can't make calls without using their PIN, parents can relax knowing they're not paying for someone else's phone charges, Kohn said. Parents may choose to have the invoice sent to them directly and even place a credit limit on their student's account. Kohn said this control helps protect students from overuse of toll services and guard against fraud and unauthorized use of their PIN. NYNEX is a global communications and media corporation that provides a full range of services in the northeastern United States and high-growth markets around the world, including the United Kingdom, Thailand, Gibraltar, Greece, Indonesia, the Philippines, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The corporation is a leader in telecommunications, wireless communications, directory publishing and video entertainment and information services. Telesoft Corp. designs, distributes, installs, and maintains telecommunications systems that provide telephone billing and other telecommunications services to higher-education, corporate and governmental agency markets. Telesoft is currently administering programs at more than 100 universities and colleges nationwide. You can receive fax copies of recent NYNEX news releases, free of charge, 24 hours a day. Call 1-800-331-1214. An automated system will provide you with instructions. return to news archive