There Are Still 100,000 Pay Phones In the US (cnn.com)

According to the FCC, there are only about 100,000 phone booths left in the United States, and about a fifth of those are in New York. The number has decreased rapidly over the last couple decades as cellphones have been adopted by 95% of Americans. CNN reports of how these remaining pay phones still remain a steady business for some of the 1,100 companies operating them across the country: Pay phone providers reported $286 million in revenue in 2015, according to the most recent FCC report. They can still be profitable, particularly in places where there isn't cell phone or landline coverage, said Tom Keane, president of Pacific Telemanagement Services. Keane's company operates 20,000 pay phones around the country. "We have phones in Yosemite Valley that are extremely busy when there's not snow on the ground," he said. Victor Rollo said he is still making money off his 170 phones in the San Diego area. Rollo declined to say how much, but he believes pay phones are a lifeline for people who don't have other options and are valuable during emergencies or natural disasters. Rollo says he evaluates how many calls are made on the phones every month, how far away they are from each other, and how much his expenses are per month to determine whether to keep them in the ground. Phones in hospitals and along the border, where cell coverage is weak, are some of his most profitable ones.

Comments

Re:Its easy to profit

[ShanghaiBill]

Prison should be more like a five-star resort, right?

Yes. Better and more human prisons are correlated with lower recidivism. Norway has the best prisons and one of the world's lowest rates of re-offense by ex-inmates.

I have one

[fyngyrz]

I have a payphone - it's mounted on my office wall. I don't have the keys for it, and it's not connected, but to me, it's a fine nexus of pleasant memories. Most pertinently, I remember hanging out in a phone booth in rural Pennsylvania (just north of Marshall's creek on then-route 209, now "Milford Road" since the bungled Tock's Island Dam project federal land takings) with my girlfriend as a teenager, while we waited for the rain to ease up or stop. I've been fond of phone booths, and their pay phones, ever since.

So when a friend, who works for the local telco/ISP, mentioned they were about to destroy a whole bunch of them, I asked for one, and surprisingly enough, they willingly handed one over.

And there it hangs, just dripping nostalgia.

Every once in a while, I get the urge to dig in with power tools and soldering iron and turn it into a working phone, but then I realize I don't actually want anyone to call me on a landline, ever, and the the urge subsides. :)