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AT&T To Decommission Pay Phones
oahazmatt writes "According to MarketWatch, AT&T said that its pay phones will be phased out over the next year. A company spokeswoman declined to say how much revenue its pay-phone business generated, but the number is small and declining. 'The first public pay-telephone station was set up in 1878, just two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the talking device. The first coin-operated pay phone was installed in Hartford, Conn., in 1889. For decades after the pay phone's invention, many Americans relied on them because of the expense and difficulty in obtaining reliable home service. Only after World War II did the telephone become a household necessity.'"
Now where is Superman supposed to change?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
..Because there are cellphone everywhere? But if you find yourself without cellphone in a situation,would some stranger lend you his for a call you want to make?
Oh its about profit...ok..
Wincopy
Oh look, a violent crime. Better go to the nearest payphone and report it so I don't get roped in to the case just 'cos I'm concerned about someone being beaten to a pulp.
Oh, no payphone.
Death of an era, really.
As TFA says though, almost anyone and everyone has a wireless handset. I recent switched to a PP cell myself.
That's the real key... Pay phones were anonymous, with Pre-paid you can pay cas for the phone ans sim, using bogus info where needed. You can still be invisible.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Bell did not invent the telephone. It was Antonio Meucci!
When I moved to Atlanta in summer of 2004, it was the lack of pay phones in Midtown that finally made me purchase a cell phone. Had there been easily accessible pay phones in the city, I would most likely still rely on them. I wonder whether we'll see a significant increase in cell phone subscription now, or whether there aren't enough crazy luddites like me left anymore.
keep the phone add dsl to the line and a wifi connection - good to go.
It's about phreaking time.
My dog has two cell phones, thank you very much.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
At least according to AT&T, the phones aren't just going to disappear. What the article says is that AT&T is getting out of the pay phone business, turning some or all of their phones over to independent operators.
The British Telecom phone booths look really nice not to mention all the handy hooker ads inside :-)
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
People are treating ATT like the scum of the Earth here, which they may be in their mobile business, but I can't see why expecting to break even is such an evil goal.
Pay phones here in Canada are up to $1 a call now, ridiculous, when it was a quarter merely a few years before. The downturn in usage means increased cost per call for the few people that still use them, which drives a cycle that forces everyone to get some sort of cell phone.
Both my brother (an academic) and my mother have pay-as-you-go plans, which cost them about $120 a year. That's really not too bad, considering they're light users. They enjoy the convenience of a cell phone, and also the security from being able to call emergency services wherever they may be, as opposed to having to locate the nearest (dwindling number) payphones.
I simply do not see pay phones as having any further use to our society. They were important pieces of technology from a bygone era, that's all.
bork bork bork!
Every year that passes it gets more and more difficult to communicate without being monitored.
One could buy all the payphones, stick a wireless access point in them and an ADSL port on the other end of the line.
Hmmmm... With the dollar going off the cliff I might just be able to afford it.
Deleted
My 76 year old dad has neither a cell phone nor a computer, and he likes it that way!
I'm reminded of my mother's dad, who still used the outhouse even after my Uncle installed plumbing and a bathroom. "I lived [n] years without [plumbing/cell phones] and I don't need one now!
I can just see when I hit 90. "Damn it, I lived 90 years without a matter replicator or a transporter and I don't need one now!"
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Sigh... yet another classic movie cliche goes the way of the DoDo.
AT&T continues to maintain it's Telephone Lease Program, but no longer maintains pay phones.
How absurd. Did I mention I hate those bastards? I decided to give them a try, especially given their "30-day money back guarantee". I'd heard they had improved, they were a new company, my slashdot posting history aside. I found out two days later that I would be getting the same, standard 6/768 DSL they give everyone, not some new 8meg/2meg package the sales rep sold me on.
Cancelled immediately. AT&T issued a bill for $100. Settled for $50. For 3 days of service, even with a "money back guarantee".
So much for giving them a second chance. I'll never, ever, ever, ever do business with AT&T again. For any reason. To the end of my days. Those bastards will never, ever change.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I remember when you just had to push some buttons on a little box that you bought from that guy who always wore a trench coat, and the calls were free ;-)
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
I use a pay as you go phone from TMobile. After years of paying $50/mo or more to Verizon I smacked myself in the head for being such a dolt. I reviewed my bills and found that I use less than 100 minutes a month. I fill my phone with the highest cost card ($100) which gives me 1000 minutes that last a year. At $0.10/mi, I spend ~$10/mo. for a cell phone. For light users pay as you go makes sense.
Who choose not to have a cellphone because they:
I only reluctantly got a cellphone a few years ago. AFAIC, they're as close to a travesty as one can get; they've got more computing power than a PC did a decade ago, but are even less usable than the GI Joe walkie talkies I played with as a child. (I believe the audio was clearer.)
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Bow-ties are cool.
What's 2600 supposed to put on their back cover now?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Most Americans don't, which is why they carry so much debt and the economy is shitting the bed.
Blar.
One more thought - your elitist classist statement turns my stomach. people like you are what's wrong with capitalism. /. Isn't name calling fun?
Here's one more thought your sanctimonious statement turns my stomach. People like you are what's wrong with
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Now where/how exactly can Neo get back to base? Or for that matter Morpheus :(
I remember when cereal boxes would come with a whistle that would give you free calls, now THAT was a prize!
Those will still be in place as public urinals. They just won't have that occasional annoying ringing while you're in there now.
I have to deal with this here in the US. The apartment complex that I live in has gates at all the entrances (not on the parking lot), to improve security. Of course they do nothing of the sort - I jimmy them open almost once a month when I forget my keys while doing laundry, and the thugs that are too stupid to do this just break the gate - happens about once a year. Only one of the gates has a device to buzz someones apartment, and that is the front-facing gate that no one uses because all the parking is in the rear. Half the people that come visiting either don't have cellphones, so instead they just sit out in the lot and honk their horn until whoever it is they are waiting for comes out. All hours of the day and night.
Just because management thinks these flimsy pieces of metal decrease crime (or know that idiot customers think that) and they are too cheap to put in more call boxes. Can't wait till I get hired on permanently so I can buy a house.
"Nearly every scholar agrees that Bell and Watson were the first to transmit intelligible speech by electrical means. Others transmitted a sound or a click or a buzz but our boys [Bell and Watson] were the first to transmit speech one could understand."
That's from your link buddy.
Does not reading a link that proves you are wrong, while obliviously arguing otherwise make you even more stupid then?
Yes. Yes it does.
AT&T plans to help find alternative payphone operators for people who need them. The AT&T decision only applies to 13 states serviced by AT&T (SBC) payphones. AT&T only operates about 65,000 of the 1 million payphones in the US, while Verizon operates about 225,000. AT&T plans to sell as many of the phones and lines to independent operators as they can. They expect the majority of the phones to be bought by someone. They even expect to continue selling wholesale payphone service to payphone owners.
It sounds to me they just decided to let someone else field the equipment. There's a lot of exaggeration around this story, but the facts are all over the web. Death of the payphone, indeed. This reaction is kind of like saying IBM getting out of the consumer laptop and desktop PC market was the end of the Windows computer.
The feeling of being out in a completely isolated, absolutely silent, gorgeous desert valley, yet receiving communications from all over the world, was indescribable. The 25+-mile, largely open-wire line even made strange pinging and popping sounds while one talked on it, which I later learned were distant lightning strikes being picked up on what amounted to a giant VLF antenna! I would imagine that someone would have heard similar sounds by hooking a speaker to an early transcontinental telegraph line.
Leave it to the government to destroy a very positive and innocent phenomenon that served to bring people together. I imagine the copper thieves would have pilfered the wire eventually anyway, but the Park Service's action was premature, selfish and uncalled for.
The death (murder?) of the MPB is a sad story, and was just the beginning of the end of the pay phone in general.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck