I probably waited a little longer than I should have to decide against using payphones for the foreseeable future. For years now I’ve made hundreds, if not thousands of calls from payphones and used the audio to populate what is now a Shoutcast stream called “Payphone Radio“.Going forward I will use whatever phone device makes sense at the moment, the cell phone, Skype, it doesn’t matter.

It is not surprising but nevertheless a source of chagrin to rediscover just how superior call quality is from public pay telephones when compared to a cell phone. Skype and VOIP calls from home sound great but the cell phone is one of those technological developments where progress undoubtedly came with compromise.

No doubt, plenty of payphones out there deliver garbage to non-existent call quality. But that’s par for the course when dealing with outdoor public amenities exposed to the elements and public vandalism. A majority of NYC’s payphones I encounter work fine, and deliver call quality clearer and more intelligible than I get from my fancy Galaxy phone.

To keep the spirit of Payphone Radio alive I will only make phone calls, not studio-type recordings, though I see the latter coming eventually. If anything this virus has accelerated the inevitable path Payphone Radio faced in moving on from using only payphones as its microphone. Eventually, if the City has its way, all our payphones will vanish.

I’ve never been much of a germophobe but it had never been lost on me that a publicly shared telephone handset would rank among the most perfect conduits for transmitting a contagion from one party to another. I have never gotten sick from using a payphone (as far as I know), but it seemed a needless risk to keep using them for the foreseeable future.

In other turning-point news I happily report that CheapShoutcastHosting, the hosting company where Payphone Radio is based, finally decided to allow automated payments. Until now, for as much as a year since I created an account there, the company ignored my repeated requests asking if it was humanly possible to automate payments, as virtually every subscription service I’ve ever used had managed to accomplish.

I don’t know if the virus and its potential for making people unable to keep up with non-automated payments had anything to do with it but regardless, I welcome that little bit of good news.