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Requiem for the Disappearing Pay Phone
StarEmperor writes "This Washington Post article describes the steady disappearance of pay phones as cell phones become more commonplace. Many pay phones, which used to generate hundreds of dollars per month in revenue, are now used so infrequently that they cost money to operate. I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?"
What if I, say, want to buy these payphones they're throwing out? I'd love to have an ACTUAL payphone in my house or something.
... payphones are great to have in an emergency - and there are tens of millions of people in the US w/o a cellphone.
The real question is: are they going to keep operating those phones that lose them money? Should payphones be thought of as something essential like public transportation, and possibly subsidized by the govt?
the payphone out in the Middle of Nowhere already disappeared. Here is a link to the going-away of it and why. Basically, the National Park Service and the Mojave National Preserve thought that there would be too much environmental impact if the booth remained too much longer.
--Fuzz
This should be modded up.
That was such a stupid step to take, unless they were looking for everyone to add just one more thing to the list of the benefits of having a cell phone. Payphones always have had two advantages in my mind:
1: They are wired, hence, no fuzz.
2: Just one shiny thing and you could get a call through.
Now that it's 50 cents, I find myself approaching a payphone and finding that I don't have the right amount of change on me. Who cares that it's unlimited? The three minute limit was just fine by me. I'm not exactly making leisure calls at a pay phone. The trade off is ridiculous and is bound to doom the payphones.
I only agree if the cell user is not using a headset and using a phone with special hands free dialing features. Otherwise, we might as well ban conversation between 2 or more occupants of a car.
Bell Canada has announced that they are converting some of their thousands of pay phones into 802.11 access points to extend their new WiFi service offering. WiFi-only companies like FatPort would be wise to follow suit. PayPhones are in the best possible locations for WiFi -- think AirPorts, hotel lobbies, train stations...
They should convert them into WiFi hotspots.
Rather than throw out all those pay phones, I think it would be much more interesting to see them reused. Perhaps as 802.11 access points or something. Just replace the phone with a digital pay box with an antenna on top. Simply swipe your credit card, hook into the network, and roam around with 20 or 30 minutes of wireless access.
There are still vast regions of the country that have limited cell phone coverage, especially for newer networks that provide high(er)-speed wireless data services.
I recently switched cell phone providers from Verizon to T-Mobile so I could utilize their GPRS/GSM-based wireless internet service on my laptop (~115Kbps) using my new bluetooth-enabled phone. While CDMA coverage in the U.S. is rather extensive, the GPRS networks that AT&T and T-Mobile have deployed are still very much confined to highly-populated regions of the country.
There I was in Westchester County, NY (about 50 miles N of Manhattan) trying to locate a client's office and imagine my frustration when my brand new GPRS-based phone was out of range. I had to stop at a supermarket and find enough change to call from a payphone - it saved my day.
Perhaps a more direct metaphor is in order: You're picking up litter in a burning building.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I can't stand cell phones, I don't need or want one, and I don't plan on getting one now. Maybe I have become truly die hard cynical, but this smacks of another case where I am being herded into buying something I don't need, because the public (read free or optional) alternative was taken away from me. I am so moving to Canada or Australia.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Maybe it's time for a new topic for mods to vote on "How appropriate, in the slashdot tradition, do you think this article/news item is?" Meaningless and/or uninteressting stuff are more and more frequent on the slashdot frontpage (or maybe I should change my profile to display less entries?).
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
Payphones have all but disappeared around London, since so few calls are made on them and almost everyone has a cell phone. This trend started years ago. When I was last in London cellphones even worked down in the Tube.
One thing disappearing payphones would mean: One more parking place available at finer gas stations and 7-11's everywhere.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
San Jose Mercury story: hundreds of mailboxes removed from San Francisco bay area, due to low usage, garbage thrown in mailboxes, fear of more anthrax attacks, etc. etc. I can't help worrying about all anonymous means of communication shutting down.
Many municipalities require that telcos provide payphones within the region they serve as an understood cost of having control of the local area. NYC is a good example of this; Verizon is required to provide a certain number of payphones within a certain area, etc.
Additionally, the cost is offset greatly by the advertising revenue generated by payphones. The REAL issue isn't the telcos killing off Payphones, but putting up booths with no phones IN them for months at a time. Verizon got nailed for doing this in an NYT articlea while back.
Either the WP post is totally off base, or other municipalities andthe baby bells that serve them are friggin' morons.
-rt
I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?
How about junking hundreds of thousands or millions of cellphones. Plus the batteries each unit may go through in a lifetime. There's no way those things last as long as a nice clunky pay phone. I know we have a couple of dead ones around here somewhere, and a lot of people upgrade simply for fashion or features.
Yes, people are looking into recycling the phones. It's difficult because the materials are so heterogeneous, and though a few like tantalum are quite valuable, the labor to break up the phones can outweigh that. A nicer idea -- hand-me-downs to less wealthy developing countries, for sale or parts. Cellular phones have a disproportionate value in countries that never got the telephone line infrastructure in the first place.
Let us face the facts...the Line-driven phone system is surprisingly obsolete.
.com people back into a profitable battle. A phone booth today gives me no reason to visit it...unless I can download the latest linux kernel in less than 100 seconds for $1.00. With such a more efficient data network, membership would be based on unlimited use, bandwidth/quality that you desire, congestion status of the network, and/or a random non-member use that is payable at the node (aka receptacle/phone).
In Poland, and many other countries I don't remember, the Phone system consists of a cellular network! Many people disagree with cellular systems, out of fear of medical influences; that is reasonable. Yet ther is no other ethical wireless alternative to microwave other than what? Pick somthing that doesn't need to be ran through a medium; fiber optice need not apply, infrared could imply somthing good, wire is back to stage1. The total cost of ownership of modern phone booths on an out-dated phone system is the problem. They take too much space, too much maintenance, and are generally not reliable in all situations of elemental emergency (vehicles that smash into them, storms, vandelism,etc). What they need is a more ethical data-networked system. Future phone booths may as well be a service provided by a local internet cafe, that is the technology I think will reserect the layed-off
Total cost of ownership of computer hardware is much lower than qualified line installers running around an area creating ground loops and phucking with a phreaking system of accousticly line-driven phones. Can you imagine, maybe membership of your internet service provider could provide access to such a future communication booth. That is worth the clustered effort for such as wireless system!
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
There is another big difference between talking to a passenger and talking to someone on the phone. If I'm talking to a passenger, there is some chance that they will cause me to look at them, to make eye contact. My wife often complains that I don't look at her when I talk to her enough, but even once while driving is too many times.
I also have often wondered about how the laws about cellphones are written such that they cover cell phones but not cb's. And for some reason it really bothers me that there is almost certainly an explicit or implicit exclusion for police.
But, in a vain effort to swerve this post from its current tangent back towards on-topicness, the one thing that seems to bother me the most about the disappearance of payphones is that they're often very usefull in emergencies. Not everyone has a cellphone, and there are often circumstances which render them useless (bad signal reception, low battery, etc...) It's nice to have a hardline here and there where 911 can be dialed with ease, if you happen to see an accident or a fire, or a lynch mob, or perhaps if you're experiencing a heart attack or just went into labor. Granted, these are not common occurences, and the telco's certainly shouldn't be forced to maintain costly infrastructure at a loss, but at the same time that payphones are being pulled down, local and state governments are erecting emergency call boxes. Would it be all that hard to have the government agencies that are erecting the call boxes just use that money to pay the telco's to maintain their payphones? It seems like there should be a middle ground here....
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
What do you do with the huge adress book in your cell phone? I fill it with pay phone numbers. See, sometimes I want to dial a person. Other times I want to dial a place, and the person is not important.
...And some more... ..and some from the airport in my hometown, Vigra
I have collected about a hundred or so I suppose. Shared them with my friends of course. We sometimes dial them to ask some stranger what the weather is like there, whether the bakery has some nice offers etc. Sometimes we play music at them.
Responses have been entirely positive (it's not harassement, after all, if you actually take a pay phone that's ringing, you're expecting to be suprised).
Wardriving sounds fun, and a lot more useful than this, but hey, not everyone can afford a wireless card...
Want to try? I'll share some of my numbers with you. They're in norway. so it's expensive for most of you, but... just remeber to put 047 in front of them to get out of your own country.
Some boxes near Bislett stadium in Oslo:
22565586
22607202
Box near (a duious) pub in my hometown. Call it at midnight on a friday for an interesting chat.
70132334
A mall in Oslo, Byporten:
22171821
Airports are full of bored travelers. Here are some numbers for Gardermoen, Oslo:
63975924
63983701
63982832
63983706
63983703
63982831
70183623
70183622
Karl Johan is the main street in Oslo, always a busy place:
22834080
22834978
22835775
22835777
A subway station in Oslo, Grønland:
22174166
22175106
22175563
22175567
The school where I'm trying to become a software engineer (phone boxes outside the toilets):
70126928
70128975
OK, that's it for now. I can't guarantee no typos, or that some boxes may have been taken down. If someone could post numbers for boxes in their surroundings, I'd be grateful (preferrably in a more relevant/permanent forum than this slashdot thread)
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The U.S. mobile market may be chaotic because of all of the different "standards" here (CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN, PCS [aka CDMA-1900]), but the competition for customers is so fierce that the companies are doing this.
Mind you, the peak minutes are expensive (I get 400 minutes for $40 and extra minutes are 45 cents), and incoming calls are tallied against that as well -- except during off peak time.
I was in Manhattan on 9/11/2001 and I know that there were lines at the pay phones everywhere. My cell phone and landline were down most of the day, but I assume the people on the pay phone were getting through to their loved ones?