Near the entrance of Ruby Tuesday’s stands a silver box – a shell of the pay phone that used to sit there, with only a rectangular cutout in its metal frame and a “dialing instructions” sign to show that it ever existed.
Is your cell phone dead and you need to let the family know you will be late? No problem, just pull in and use the pay phone, right? Not so fast, my friend. Finding a pay phone these days is not that easy.
Preying on the weak, desperate and cell-phone deprived, who often are making an emergency call home, [pay phone providers] await the next innocent victim. It’s a racket, and it's worthwhile stopping.
Kind of the retro-future public payphone of the internet era, the Handlink Wi-Fi access point saves time from all that messing about you sometimes have to do in internet cafs. (Gizmodo Australia)
The mayor's call to remove all outdoor pay phones has generated mixed reactions with some calling the idea good for public safety and others calling it bad public policy.
With its taped advertisements and garbage-laden ledges, the pay phone in New York, that familiar feature of the streetscape, is becoming a grimy museum relic.
From a Malkin & Ross press release: "The New York State Senate and Assembly reached agreement at the end of this year's legislative session on legislation that would treat prison telephone service as a right, not as a revenue generator....
BT is re-vamping the design of its public payphones. The new design, by ad firm JCDecaux, accommodates more advertising on the phones in a drive to compensate for dwindling revenues from payphone usage. "The new, cutting edge design, is the...
"SaskTel is being urged to remove pay phones from an inner city neighbourhood in Regina amid accusations that they're facilitating drug dealing and prostitution. "But other people argue that the phones, located near the General Hospital in the Core neighbourhood,...
"There is a new take on phone booths at Eastern Connecticut State University, and it is designed to keep the library the way it is supposed to be - quiet." I looked at these booths last year, and expressed skepticism...
"According to Statistics Canada, the number of pay phones across Canada dropped by almost 40,000 -- or more than 20% -- from 178,116 in 1997 to 140,431 by the end of last year. The pace of removal is quickening, with...
There are still holdouts. Luddites, you might say, who oppose new technologies. To a limited extent I am one such holdout, as is Mark Rutledge, at Reflector.com: "I've been sucked so far into this cell-phone culture, I completely forgot that...
The Payphone Project gets a mention in this story from Victoria, Canada, which explores ambivalence to the expected rate increase for calls made from Telus payphones. "Plenty of people eschew, can't afford, or just don't need cellphones. The question is...
Despite their bleak future, pay phones can still serve as a vital communications link during times of disaster. Service for cellphones and home phones could be disrupted or knocked out by an earthquake, for example. However, public phone service will be available.
"This is a state-sponsored scam," said state Sen. Andrew McDonald, D-Stamford. "It's an outrageous intrusion on the rights of families with people in prison. And that's who bears this cost - the families." McDonald said the money generated from the calls should instead be spent on inmate re-entry programs, and he plans to work with state officials to implement such a reform.
"Not surprisingly, your need for pay phones increases as your income decreases: 88 per cent of low-income Canadians use pay phones at least a few times a year, according to a 2003 national survey conducted by the Montreal-based Union des consommateurs. That includes 22 per cent who use pay phones daily."
At issue are payments for coinless calls on Metrophones' payphones over Global Crossing's network. The calls involve special access codes such as 1-800 or 10-10-220.
The Union-Tribune's Michael Stetz writes:
"Mark Thomas, who started The Payphone Project, digs pay phones. Thomas used to call them out of the blue and play a tape of one of his piano performances over the line to whomever answered. He liked the odd connection between perfect strangers. Today, most pay phones won't take incoming calls, though."
Scotland's Pennan phone box, declared by a local tourism board as "the most famous phone booth in the world," was the scene of record breaking achievement. 16 gymnasts filled the famous phone box, breaking the booth-stuffing record set in...
Because of its central role in the movie "Local Hero," a phone booth in Pennan, Scotland has become one of Scotland's leading tourist attractions. While many calls come in to this phone, however, few calls seem to go out, causing...
This story is from Texas, but could happen in any U.S. state. A man makes two phone calls from a payphone and gets socked with a bill for $122.90. This is a story to keep in mind the next time...
By BT Scotland's math, annual maintenance costs for a phone box are about £1,600. This story profiles a Scotland phone box that was only used for three calls in an entire year, making its cost-per-call ratio rather conspicuous.
"There was drama in Nateete recently..." This all-too-short story reads like a screenplay-in-waiting. From this story, it sounds as if a man in Nateete, Uganda, used a community payphone to make a call. Africa is largely without any sort of...
A long article from Penn State University's "Daily Collegian" describes the inexorable decline in payphones from the university's campus. Canadian company Freefone might be in line to replace college campus payphones with free (ad-supported) public phones, such as those seen...
"The Court of Appeals, in a 4-2 decision, reversed a lower court's determination that the lawsuit should be dismissed for a lack of timeliness. That was incorrect, the high court ruled. While not making any judgment on whether inmates would...
The Daily Herald warns against getting ripped off by unscrupulous payphone operators, and also includes a few interesting facts and figures about the state of the payphone business. "Some billion and a half calls were made on pay phones last...
Here is an interesting story about one reporter's involvement in the infamous Zodiac serial murderer case. In September, 1969, the Zodiac called police from a payphone, bragging about his most recent murder. Unable to track payphones to exact locations, police fanned out to try and find a payphone with its receiver off the hook.
It is fair to assert that most New Yorkers are probably indifferent to the decline in payphones in the subway system. Despite the fact that cell phones generally do not work in the city's subways, I would think that most cell-phone carrying straphangers are connected to the world constantly enough to a point where the brief time spent out of touch is a welcome respite, at least for a little while.
For many years, one of the most frequently visited sections of The Payphone Project has been the pages explaining what it means when phone numbers such as (720) 587-9978 and (404) 461-9978 show up on your caller ID.
By far the most impressive individual's collection of payphone pictures I have seen in a long time, Loren Everly has travelled the world keeping an eye out for, among other things, phone booths and payphones. As the number of...