This phone was owned by Telebeam, one of the original independent payphone service providers in New York. Telebeam is headquartered on 37th Street, not far from this spot on Broadway near Steinway Street in Astoria.

Telebeam got booted out of the payphone business in the five boroughs to make way for the CityBridge monopoly. They may still have phones on Long Island and at indoor locations in New York, but I doubt it. Telebeam survived by diversifying into corporate phone systems and other services. They seem to have given up on their website, presumably because it relied almost 100% on the retired Adobe Flash plugin.

This phone having been outside a library reminds me that I believe public libraries should establish telephone rooms, where anyone with a library card could call anywhere in the country for a limited length of time. If San Francisco can have a typewriter room at its library why can’t  they also supply a telephone for those who lost, cannot maintain control of, or simply do not want a cell phone? It would likely serve only a tiny niche of the public but assuming it’s a VOIP device it sounds, to me at least, like a very low-impact, low-cost service to offer, assuming there are limits on its usage. Such phones are available at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, and I assume other hospitals as well. Free three-minute calls are allowed, but only to numbers with New York City area codes. It seems like an odd restriction, since many New Yorkers have numbers with area codes from outside the 5 boroughs. It must be that the hospital decided allowing nationwide calls over those phones would attract nuisance usage.

However it would be implemented, at public libraries or wherever else, I think some form of free public telephone where calls could be made in private should be made available.

In New York, Newark, and Philadelphia I am well aware of the Link totems that offer free nationwide calls. But I don’t want to be this guy, or this guy, screaming into one of these things as the voice of the person I called blasts out of the kiosk’s loudspeaker for all to hear. In the past I used payphones to call certain types of depression and counseling hotlines. These are not the type of conversations I would want broadcast over something like LinkNYC.