ALLTEL, SBU announce 5-year service contract

by Karen E. Culp

SBJ Staff

Southwest Baptist University has signed a five-year contract with ALLTEL for local telephone service to its campus phone lines.

The agreement includes SBU's administrative offices and student residence halls.

The agreement is valued at $750,000. ALLTEL is the provider of local telephone service for the Bolivar area, according to Barry Bishop, area manager for ALLTEL.

"We've been involved with Southwest Baptist for many, many years. We've been providing them wireline services for more than 20 years," Bishop said. The university is ALLTEL's largest wireline customer in Missouri, he added.

ALLTEL will provide 516 lines of

digital centrex service to all residence halls on campus, as well as 1,056 voice boxes.

The service will actually amount to 1,056 phone lines, said Phillip Poole, executive assistant to the president for Southwest Baptist University.

Each student will have his or her own phone line, he added.

SBU will have 1,011 students living on campus this fall; 1,056 is the number of beds the university has available, Poole said.

The enrollment on the main campus will be 1,725, and the university's total enrollment, which includes its graduate students and Salem, Mountain View and Springfield satellite colleges, will be about 3,500 students this semester, Poole said.

Classes began at SBU Aug. 24.

The agreement with ALLTEL came about primarily because ALLTEL is the local provider in Bolivar, Poole said, but the package deal is competitive with phone service offered at other universities of SBU's size, he added.

ALLTEL provides wireline services in 60 exchanges in Missouri, Bishop said, and has both wireline and wireless service throughout the state. Bishop said there is a possibility that ALLTEL could offer more services to the university as new products and services are introduced in the Bolivar area.

Each dorm room will be equipped with a purple phone customized with SBU's Bearcat mascot, and each student will have a personal voice-mail box and telephone number, Poole said.

SBU is one of the largest private universities in Missouri.

The university has just started its 120th year and offers 49 undergraduate majors and 11 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Its graduate degree programs include two different degrees: a master of science in business administration that offers three different concentrations, and a master of education that offers two different tracks.

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Each dorm room will be equipped with a purple phone customized with SBU's Bearcat mascot, and each student will have a personal voice-mail box and telephone number.[[In-content Ad]]