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."

Comments

Ok but

[TerryAtWork]

When will we see the utopian frog-on-a-lilly-pad wi-fi stuff I read about in Wired?

If my Phone/DSL company (Verizon)

[Anonymous Coward]

Started including Wi-Fi access via their pay-phones for me, it'd make me not only a happier customer, but one willing to pay a bit more for service.

Dupe?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/11/162825 7&mode=thread&tid=95

How about 911?

[Ryu2]

I just thought of this.... Could it be a point of argument that removing pay phones reduces access to 911 emergency services for those economically disadvantaged who don't have cell phones? Have there been any studies done to test the validity of this (eg, crime rates vs. pay phone presence?)

Re:How about 911?

[Simon Field]

Pay phones are going away because they are not making money.

This idea may save those pay phones, since DSL and voice can co-exist. And having a phone by the WiFi terminal allows you to get tech support (for another quarter?) when things aren't working.

As for people who can't afford cell phones not having access to 911, I don't know if this is more of a problem since the cell phone was invented, or less. Finding someone with a cell phone nearby these days may be easier than finding a pay phone nearby was in the bad old days.

Re:How about 911?

[qqtortqq]

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.

My proposal.

[kaosrain]

Why don't we all band together, and whenever a user submits a dupe we all add them to our 'foes' list? Doesn't directly stop anyone from posting repeats, but if I knew that submitting one could get me hundreds of foes, I'd probably check my submissions for duplicates.

Re:My proposal.

[Spunk]

Parent is correct. I'll repost the AC's comment here so it's +2 rather than 0

-----
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
-----

Re:Money

[kawaichan]

how payment might work:

1) Your laptop/PDA/whatever requests an IP address via DHCP.
2) Access point hands out IP address, makes a note against that IP address that "has not paid yet"
3) At this point, all that you can do is access HTTP and DNS.
4) You point your browser at any web site - let's say http://slashdot.org for grins.
5) DNS succeeds.
6) Your computer does an HTTP GET.
7) Access device sees you've not paid yet. Sends HTTP REDIRECT to https://fork.it.over.to.me
8) Your laptop looks that up. Gets an IP address.
9) Your laptop requests page.
10) Page comes up - input credit card here.
11) You do so. Access device marks you has "paid for 1 Hour". Ports open up.
12) You again try /., and it goes through.

Cafe Security

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

While this plan isn't without its merits, its also going to be without users such as myself for some time. No matter show secure the "FI"delity is stated, I get about the same warm fuzzies transmitting anything of any value over such a system as I would shopping online at an internet cafe.

And its not really the systems themselves that concern me, but the human error factors ... and mostly privacy factors. I can't imagine any large corporation implementing such a system without the temptation of at least using my demographics, if not outright selling any non-secure personal information to me to the highest bidder.

This not to say I'd never use it ... just not for anything really important or private. At least for now.

Re:Cafe Security

[zulux]

No matter show secure the "FI"delity is stated, I get about the same warm fuzzies transmitting anything of any value over such a system as I would shopping online at an internet cafe.

Do wha I do: Make a secure tunnel from your laptop to an OpenBSD server you have hanging off the net and set up as a gateway. They can grab all the wireless packets they want, but it ain't gonna' get them anywhere.

Just so we're all clear...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dupe 1 (orig)
Dupe 2 (orig)
Dupe 3 (orig).

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.

Maybe

[Znonymous Coward]

Maybe people like me would use the pay phone more if it were 10 cents per a call, not 50-75 cents like it is now. And maybe I would have a "land line" phone in my home if it weren't nearly $50 a month after taxes, FCC feens, 911 imposed fee, etc.

Or, the monolpy phone companies can just coninue to loose money and customers to cell phones.

[/rant]

Already in the UK

[Cally]

BT has been doing this in the UK for ages - I think I saw the first ones (in Liverpool St station, London) in late 1999 or early 2000. There's one on the corner of my street now. (Brixton.)

Beware the Standards!

[Durindana]

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.

War On Drugs Already Killed Their Pay Phones

[billstewart]

The War on Drugs already killed pay-phone availability in areas where those "economically disadvantaged" live. One of the other commenters said that they only see drug dealers using them,
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.

Dupe!

[gmarceau]

Well, its turns out that living in Montreal and caring for the phone company there(*) is useful to spot duplicate stories :

Bell Canada Turns Payphones into Public Hotspots
Posted by michael on Wed Dec 11, '02 11:59 AM
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/11/162825 7&mode=flat&tid=95

(*) : Bell Canada actually offers very good service, ground lines phones, cell phones, dsl, it's all good

Pay phones? What are those?

[dghcasp]

Funny this should come up now... I just saw something about pay-phones in the Facts & Arguments column of friday's Globe and Mail (italics mine...)

In October, a shopping mall devoted to 1960s-and-earlier nostalgia opened in Tokyo, The New York Times says. Ichome Shotengai (District 1 Shopping Area), which attracts the elderly, has been doing booming business in an otherwise flat Japanese economy. "Increasingly, young people are turning up to gawk at the artifacts of a world they never knew -- boxy televisions that play tapes of the original black-and-white shows, beauty salons with posters of big, beehive hairdos and public telephone booths with rotary dial phones. In a country where almost everyone under 30 owns a cellphone, it is not uncommon to see young people step into the booths unaware that the caller has to turn the dial to operate the old phones."