• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

In Fall, Thoughts Turn to Technology

Posted on: Sunday, 4 September 2005, 15:00 CDT

Sep. 3--Thousands of college students are once again flooding into dormitories and apartment buildings around Boston, which means that cable and wireless companies are swooping in, eager to sell them a menu of electronic and entertainment services.

The annual "fall rush" weekend, going on now, and marked by a gaggle of moving trucks and dollies cluttering the streets around Boston's campuses, also has the distinction of being the busiest weekend for cable companies like Comcast and RCN Corp. to sign up and install equipment for new customers. Cellphone companies like Verizon Wireless are also looking to sign up students who may have been sent to school without phones in their pockets.

"This is our Christmas," said Karyn O'Connor, who manages Verizon Wireless' Boylston Street retail store in the Back Bay, an area frequented by students from Boston University, Berklee College of Music, and Emerson College.

The store has been so busy this week, she said, that it's had to hire five employees to handle the traffic. Still, wait times to purchase and activate a phone are as long as two hours.

With all the students in town, telecom companies have made an annual ritual of blanketing campuses and off-campus residential areas with entertainers, salespeople, and installation crews, all vying for their piece of the student pie. RCN is offering students rides on rickshaw cabs and moving help, while Comcast workers on Segway scooters are jaunting around Northeastern University and other campuses wearing digital billboards and hawking digital cable with on-the-spot installations to dormitory students.

Northeastern roommates Sean Rusinko Jr., Joe Gillespie, and Garett Gamache said yesterday that they'd been seeing Comcast advertisements all afternoon, while they hung out on the sidewalk waiting to move into their Back Bay apartment. While the trio were interviewed by a reporter, two Comcast employees on Segways rode by handing out fliers.

Gamache said they plan to buy a package of services from Comcast that includes digital cable and high-speed Internet access.

"I could live without cable, but not without Internet," Gillespie said. That declaration aside, Gamache admitted he had scheduled cable installation even before calling the electric utility to make sure the apartment had lights.

In Northeastern's student center, representatives of banks, credit card companies, and other firms worked to sign up newly matriculated pupils, but no table was busier than Comcast's. After filling out a form, students walked away with a self-installation kit including a digital cable box, remote control, and cable wire on the spot.

Cable executives said the demand for their product always spikes at this time of year, but they still need to promote themselves to students to stay ahead of their competition.

Neither Comcast nor RCN would disclose how many student subscribers they had, but both said the college market is lucrative because technology-savvy students are easy to sell on services besides cable, such as high-speed Internet.

When Comcast offered its home networking service to students last year, "it was just an amazing take rate without any marketing at all," said Paul D'Arcangelo, the company's eastern New England area vice president. "We had to raise our level of resources quickly to keep up with the demand."

Likewise, RCN is touting its other digital services, especially its high-speed Internet, with fliers that proclaim its speed as faster than all its competitors.

Despite the cable companies' enthusiasm, an analyst said college students represent only an incremental revenue increase for telecom companies.

"You have very high churn with the college students," who are in town for nine months at best before they cancel their service and go back home, said Chris R. Roberts, a cable analyst and director of research as Tejas Securities Group Inc. in Austin, Texas.

Overall, he said, working professionals and family households are more valuable to cable companies.

But the firms market so heavily on college campuses during the fall rush period because it provides an opportunity to sign up thousands of new customers in a brief period with relatively little effort or expense.

"You can take 20 guys, take three or four days, and sign up a few thousand customers," Roberts said.

-----

To see more of The Boston Globe, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.boston.com/globe.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Boston Globe

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

VZ, VOD, CMCSK, RCNC,

Source: The Boston Globe

More News in this Category