AT&T Corp. said it will begin charging the majority of its Pennsylvania customers a monthly fee of $1.95 starting March 1 in an attempt to cover access fees instituted by local telephone companies.

The new fee will most likely be applied to the majority of Penn State students who use the pre-subscribed AT&T long-distance service in on-campus housing. Only subscribers to the low-income long-distance Lifeline program and those who spend less than $1 a month on long-distance will be exempt from the fee, AT&T spokeswoman Lenora Vesio said.

The company said that carriers like Verizon are charging an average of 6 cents per minute for use of long distance lines within Pennsylvania, but only 1.5 cents per minute for out-of-state long distance calls. Although the company says it is impossible to know how much the networking costs are, it is confident that they are much lower than the prices AT&T is asked to pay.

"If the interstate access fees are less than 1.5 cents a minute, why is the permanent access fee 4.5 cents higher?" Vesio said. "It points to the need for the state Public Utility Commission (PUC) to regulate more than they do at this point."

AT&T has a case pending before the PUC in an attempt to lower the fees charged by Verizon in its former GTE territories (Bell Atlantic and GTE merged in 2000 to form Verizon Communications).

Robert Frieden, professor of telecommunications, said this sort of price hike is not uncommon with the long-distance carriers, but that they are often "back-door" ways to raise rates. He said access charges to long-distance companies had been dropping as a rule, and he was surprised that AT&T would be instituting this fee now.

Ashli Baker (sophomore-biology and anthropology) sometimes uses AT&T's long distance service from her dorm room.

"I believe they have a monopoly on the service in the dorms," Baker said. "When I came here, I know it wasn't like, 'Choose from all these long-distance companies.' It was basically AT&T or use your cell phone. But as a consumer advocate, if it's a lack of competition that's driving this increase, students have to know they have options."

Frieden said that a resourceful on-campus resident does, in fact, have a choice in which long-distance company he or she subscribes to.

"Penn State has a very close relationship with AT&T, and the company has helped fund a lot of programs at the university," Frieden said. "But students can override the pre-subscription with any phone in the dormitories. ... They're not locked into AT&T."