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Recycling Pay Phones into Terminals
Roland Piquepaille writes "Two weeks ago, The Washington Post published a story about the death of the pay phone. It was aptly named "Requiem for the Pay Phone." Basically, it argued that as cell phones use increase, pay phones are retired from the streets. Now, according to Fortune in "Making Pay Phones Pay," Bell Canada is trying to change this situation. "Bell Canada recently started converting public pay phones in Toronto, Montreal, and Kingston into terminals for 'Wi-Fi' Internet connections. Some U.S. phone companies may soon follow suit." Check this column for more details and concerns or visit the Bell Canada's AccessZone page for details on the program and pilot locations."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/11/162825 7&mode=thread&tid=95
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Ok? Check the originals for more comments, I don't think it'll fly unless it's outrageously cheap and can maybe be paid just by walking by with an RFID tag or something else equally effortless. Geesh.
Up until a few months ago, I worked as a section 8 housing cop, and NO ONE in the ghetto uses pay phones. Most folks will wander for half an hour begging to use someone's phone who has one rather than stick the 50 cents in one of the many conveniently located pay phones. Whenever there was a problem on the property, magically 50% of the residents knew about it in less than 2 minutes, and a few would invariably come find us. We wandered the 4 buildings the whole night, and were never hard to find.
As for people without a phone that don't live in apartments, im sure it works the same way; they go to a neighbor's, or in case of emergency, the neighbor who hopefully has a phone will hear the screaming.
I used several different types of these toll-booth terminals, run by British Telecom, on a recent holiday, and discovered something not to my liking: at least the way BT does it, you'll have trouble with sites that consist of more than bare HTML. The thing was Windows- and IE-based, of course, and it did not do Javascript well at all (though it didn't seem to be a performance issue). Also the terminal refused to work with WebObjects sites... so without those two I couldn't check email at all. Waste of a pound or two.
Now Bell Canada certainly could use a better implementation. BT at least screwed this up.
but not only _do_ they use them, replying to their beepers from phone numbers that aren't easily traced to them, but police and cities have discouraged phone companies from providing them there because they want to discourage drug dealers, and this is most common in poorer urban areas. Pay phones used to be able to support incoming calls as well, but the telephone deregulation changes in the 80s and early 90s that let them be privately operated instead of only run by telcos killed that, because private operators didn't get any revenue from receiving calls (and also, the War On Politically Incorrect Drugs also meant that drug dealers would use them to receive calls.)
A few years ago, before I got a cell phone, I was trying to hunt for an apartment or house to rent in the San Francisco Bay Area. This involved a lot of trying to contact landlords and property managers to get in to see places that were advertised, but they're never in their offices - you call their beeper or answering machine and leave your phone number. I did have a beeper, but of course with no PAY PHONES around, it was hard to call them back. In some areas, there'd either be a 7-11 or else a restaurant that had a phone in the back, so if we'd left enough calls in a given area, we'd get coffee and more quarters and wait. Really frustrating....
Of course, pay phone usage in poor areas also went down because of low-cost lifeline phone rates, and because deregulation meant that the prices of pay phone calls went way up, and in high-crime neighborhoods, a coin-operated pay phone looks a lot like a parking meter - it's a box of money sitting there for any teenager with a spare metal pipe, unless it's in a well-lit high-traffic area.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Parent is correct. I'll repost the AC's comment here so it's +2 rather than 0
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That is a stupid idea. Often dozens of people submit the same story, but until one of them is accepted, there's no way for them to know that they have already been posted by someone else. What happens is that 10 people submit the same story. Then a slashdot editor accepts it. Then later, a slashdot editor accepts another one from another user, even though both users posted around the same time. Or even the second (dup) may have submitted theirs before the one that was accepted first.
So yes, the slashdot EDITORS should be punished. NOT the submitters
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