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Is the Payphone Dead?
m_evanchik asks: "The Net Economy has an article about phonebooths serving double duty as cell-phone antenna stations. I hate to see pay phones disappear and this sounds like a nice way to keep 'em alive a little longer. Heck, hacking pay phones is where it all started for the likes of Cap'n crunch. Is the pay phone a dying breed, still a necessity, or do we need more hacks like these to keep 'em alive? I say keep 'em around just for nostalgia's sake." While cellular and wireless technologies are making massive strives, personally I think it's too early to call for the end of the payphone. Heck, even with PCS, I still get dropped calls and, in more circumstances that I'd care to admit, I'm just plain unable to dial out from certain areas. This is not a problem with payphones. I'm especially grateful for the ones you find in your out-of-the-way places, like your average subway station. How do the rest of you feel?
In sweden all payphones are to be removed within a few years (according to the teleco) because their usage has dropped so much the maintance costs is higher than the earings they cash in (thanks to the cellular phones)
Here in the city I live in, pay phones were removed because it was alleged that all they do is draw drug dealers and prostitutes.
The people in the city should be careful of that sort of reasoning! Compare the number of times you've seen hookers or dealers hanging out on a corner in the city vs. a rural area.
Conclusion: cities attract crime! Demolish them immediatly!!!
Hey, now that we've all got great benefits packages, let's get rid of public health clinics. And since our kids are all living off of the largesse of our absurdly high family incomes, let's can the school lunch program. Heck, let's just bulldoze all those poor neighborhoods now that no one lives in them anymore.
Oh wait -- you mean we're not the majority, just an insular clique of tech specialists? Whoooaaaa, heavy man.
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Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
This is not a rumor, but some cell site techs wont fix sites at night. So if your mobile base station is down in east LA, its staying down till the next business day.
Dont forget, good credit gets you 10 cents a minute, poor or no credit gets you a pre-paid phone with 35 cents a minute. So even if phones are free, the minutes will cost more for lower income brackets, thus keeping cell phones out of lower income urban areas.
If I had knowledge of the details of a crime, I would only call the police from a pay phone to give them a tip. My cooperation would be predicated upon my anonymity. If they know who I am, they can question me as to how I know these details. Maybe I witnessed this crime while I was getting a hummer from the Chief's 19 year old daughter in my truck.
If I couldn't be anonymous, I'd keep my mouth shut.
If payphones are eliminated, you'll see tips to law enforcement take a steep dive.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
> Here in the city I live in, pay phones were removed because it was alleged that all they do is draw drug dealers and prostitutes.
And sadly, crime actually got worse, because they had unwittingly destroyed Superman's natural habitat.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Actually, that's what happened in South Korea about several years ago.
KT telecomm, the state-run telecommunition company once decided to cell short-ranged wireless phones --- the product name was "City Phone." It's similar to 900Mhz wireless phone that can be easily found in any American home, but the idea was the public phone booths serves as a base station, collecting phone call requests from the City Phone handsets nearby. The rate was cheaper than PCS or Cellulars. But City Phone handsets could not receive phone calls; it just can make calls.
KT was the only service provider of City Phone service because it was the only one public phone service provider in South Korea. KT started City Phone service with installing antennas and wireless base station in the exsisting public phone booth. I remember the service quality was fairly good: No noise, good sound quality. The rate was 3 or 4 times of that of normal phones, but the rate for PCS or cellular service was more than twice as much as that of City Phone.
City Phone business was found to be a total failiure in the end. It was mainly due to KT's strategy. KT tried to compete with PCS and Cellular services, but City Phone service was actually no match for them in spite of its cheap rate because City Phone handsets were unable to receive calls. That was a major drawback for customers. But KT continued to advertize its service being equivalent to PCS or celluar, but the strategy didn't work. All the customers finally all switched to PCS or celluar services instead of cheap City Phone.
KT now declared that it gave up the service. Now in Korea, especially in the metropolitan city of Seoul, careful people can easily find a tall antenna and a box or wireless base station attached to every phone booth. But the problem is they are not working. South Koreans were unable to come up with the idea that City Phone actually had been able to change all the public phone booths to cheap handsets.
Since more than 50% of South Korean people are now subscribers of PCS or cellular service, the current size of wireless networks or wirless base stations networks which were built by private service providers exceed the size of public phone networks. There is no reason for South Koreans to try to "utilize" the old public phone booth. But what I found out in this KT failure case is that exsisting public phone booths can serve as another kind of information service. In my personal opinion, if KT had tried to market City Phone as an alternative to public phone card, it might have been successful. Maybe South Koreans would be buying cheap personalized handsets to use public phone. Maybe the handsets might be evolving into "disposable phone" now, which was discussed in slashdot recently.
There are many kinds of things to do with exsiting public phone network. Network is important; without network, the value of individual service must remain low. My cell phone is valuable because I can make phone calls to my friend who is another subscriber of the same service or I can receive a call from him. Although the clumsy business plan of KT in Korea had ended in total failure, I really wish other countries find some better ways to utilize the existing public phone network. With some careful planning, KT and City Phone could have been successful in Korea. But alas....
...how can you repeatedly call the 1-800-SPAMMER numbers that show up in your e-mail?
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/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
They generally took advantage of unsuspecting users who ended up with huge charges when making calling card calls.
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." People soon learned to defend themselves by dialing 800 #s and using their own carrier calling cards to make calls. COCOT owners cried the blues and got the current 35/cent reimbursement for toll free calls. Many of them resorted to dirty tricks, like blocking 800-CALL-ATT for example.
I remember about 5 years ago thinking "Soon, everyone will be carrying a cell phone and these scum will all go broke and I'll be jumping for joy."
So, now I'm jumping for joy.
I do realize some people rely on pay phones on the corner since they can't afford their own, but I think those numbers are pretty slim. Cell phones are getting pretty cheap now. All pay phones have to do is charge reasonable prices and they'll be fine. I've seen one near here that advertises 25 cents local calls (cheaper than RBOCs) and 25 cents/min anywhere in U.S. via coins. That's a good thing. I know what the charge is ahead of time, I pay as I go, and I can evaluate whether or not it's cheaper than my cell phone easily.
Of course, just like anonymity on the Net, it can be misused. But just like anonymity on the Net, it's something that I'm sure all of us, certainly the Slashdot-reading people, wants to make sure doesn't go away completely.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Am I the only one who thinks this question is patently absurd? First, most people do not have any type of mobile communications device. Second, most people on earth don't have any phone at all. Third, payphones currently generate in excess of five billion US dollars revenue per annum.
This "question" seems to be an exercise in showing how techno savvy the author is, rather than asking a practical or intelligent question. "Analog communication via landline? Oh that is just so 20th century dahling." This seems like one of the many Slashdot discussions that get sucked into some geektopia fantasy land. I don't know about your reality but in mine there are people living in subway tunnels, boxes, and doorways, and I doubt they are much impressed with pay phones' nostalgia value.
"One ringy-dingy..."
I would never buy a cellphone, for the mere fact that I wouldn't want to be that accessible. I hardly ever answer the phone when I'm home, so why would I want to cart a cellphone around with me?
However, I do have the occasional need when I'm out in public to make a phone call, in which case I'm thankful for public phones.
I don't think public phones will be going anywhere any time soon. The majority of people that I know don't have cell phones, and the public phones in the areas I frequent seem to experience moderate usage.
I, for one, love the payphone. It lets you make that oh-so-important call just after you're released from prison!
"Hi mom, I need a ride home. I just got out of the county lockup!"
"Oh my god honey, why were you there?"
"Drinking and hacking again"
"Oh son...I'm so disappointed..."
No, you need a payphone to wire a hard line in to... if they all suddenly get taken away I'm going to get a lot more suspicious of the world than I was before I was that movie...
I mean, geez, even the article says it: The point is that a significant number of people still use payphones, although that number has decreased to the point that British Telecom recently doubled the basic charge and is looking at ways to remake the booths into something sexier and more lucrative, like Internet kiosks. They're not making as much money as they used to for the phone companies, but they're not useless nostalgia items, either.
Court houses, jails, bars, schools, YMCAs, hotels, government buildings, and points of transit, plus stand-alone payphones in those "special" parts of town.
In other words, phones where interesting conversations might take place. The local whorehouse phone (pay or not) is always monitored, but I have never seen a order on a public phone in a library.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
It's really more due to the fact that pay phones (Bell called them "public phones") are no longer considered a "public resource" the way they once were. A whole city block used to be able to use public phones to receive phone calls and whoever answered the ringing phone would usually be gracious enough to run to the next house to inform the callee that the telephone was for them. However, after deregulation, instead of getting a special pay phone line from the phone company, anybody could buy a fortress phone from a catalog (COCOT), connect it to a regular phone line (POTS), and start billing callers. These private owners did not want anybody to use their property without paying a stiff fee, and successfully used the "drug dealer office" argument to remove incoming call ability from virtually all pay phones, including telco-owned ones. This act really spelled the end for the "public resource" paradigm. Many COCOT owners also ignored regulations outlawing billing customers for toll-free calls, and after a while, people got used to the idea. Now, pay phones are only used by the poor, and everybody else has a cell phone for use on the go.
That said, it's a shame they are going the way of the dodo. Yep, they are.
The problem is that, because of cellphones, pay phone use is decreasing. That means pay phones make less money. That means the for-profit corporations now running them will pull them. Simple economics -- if you're the only one in town who needs a left-handed three-pitch anchor screw, don't expect Home Depot to carry it.
So without making anything like a general comment (heh) on the topic, let me just point out that this is one small area where capitalism is clearly failing. For all the evils of the ATT/Bell monopoly, it did subsidize necessary but unprofitable services like pay phones and hard to service local lines with the profits from more lucrative and voluntary things like long distance. Not a good thing if you're a big long distance customer, but a very good thing if your car just got jacked and you need to call the police.
Considering the libertarian/capitalistic streak that runs through the /. community, it is kind of amusing to see this outpouring of enthusiasm over a service which is clearly going to die because the evil corporate pigs don't make enough money off of it. Pay phones are just one detail in the broad category of infrastructure which IMO really should be maintained by taxes and subsidies, because without some social engineering they just won't exist even though they are beneficial.
Of course, the other possibility is that the cost of a pay call will go up. Some phones already meter local calls by the minute. But that's a spiral to doom; make the call too expensive and more people will spring for a cell phone, usage will go down more, you will have to jack the price again, etc.
If someone has a solution to this that will not get called "communism" or "socialism" by the usual elements, I'd be very interested in hearing about it. Meanwhile, this is just one of those things that, to me, argue against the purely liberarian/capitalistic worldview -- whatever its other beneficial contrasts might be to the current overall situation.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Yep, you're right. And besides, the drug dealers and prostitutes just got beepers and cell phones anyway.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
Here in the city I live in, pay phones were removed because it was alleged that all they do is draw drug dealers and prostitutes. ;)
I've never seen either hanging around..
And to think all this time I was under the impression that pay phones attracted people that wanted to make phone calls. Imagine that!
If you look closely at the push to remove pay phones, you'll find that it's motivated mainly by phone companies (especially mobiles) who want to eliminate public access to telephones. Sure, cell phones calls are cheaper, but you don't need a credit card to make a pay phone call - nor a $250 deposit. This is the same sort of business vampirism that makes phone calls from prisons cost several dollars per minute in some states through a monopolist phone provider. Probably few Linux geeks see the absence of available public telecommunications as a serious problem; but there are many more people stuck in relative poverty than checking out Slashdot right now. Pay phones, without a steady income or steady job, may be their only way of talking to their families, for example. For them a pay phone is worth a hell of a lot more than a data jack in an airport phone.