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Are there any situations where it would be desirable to keep some payphones around? Potentially in some sort of natural disaster where cell towers get knocked d
by yabones 4y ago
Are there any situations where it would be desirable to keep some payphones around? Potentially in some sort of natural disaster where cell towers get knocked down, or at least reduced in capacity to the point where it's no longer possible to reliably make calls?
There was a situation in Canada a year or two ago where one of our two main wireless providers rolled out a bad firmware update to all of their transmitters at the same time and had a system wide outage for nearly nine hours, I could imagine a need for payphones if something like that were to happen in NYC.
- lbotos 4y agoNYC has these kiosks now https://www.link.nyc/ https://www.link.nyc/ Which, if they are cellular based don't solve for the problem, but I suspect some are hardwired?
- sethhochberg 4y agoThey have fiber backhaul since they are high-volume public wifi access points. I'd bet the phone tablet on the front is VoIP.
- jakzurr 4y agoFrom earlier comments: https://www.link.nyc/ https://www.link.nyc/ Each station allows free US calls.
- rhino369 4y agoEven if it were beneficial, nobody will pay to up keep them. And even if they did, without incentive to make sure they actually work, I suspect they'd fall into disrepair anyway since it wouldn't be a priority.
- Aperocky 4y agoExcept they (more specifically, ads) pay for themselves.
- bogomipz 4y agoThis just just supports the OPs point though. They may have paid for themselves but whomever was collecting that money(Titan mostly) was not maintaining the condition of the phones. The phone were almost always in disgusting and deplorable condition.
- gs17 4y agoOr just having your phone die and needing to call someone for a ride. Of course, then you need their number memorized, which is less common now.
- johannes1234321 4y agopay phones can be useful (or be misused) for anonymous communication. Say as a whistleblower. They also can be helpful when your mobile's battery runs out.
- coding123 4y agoWow I must be ancient. I remember a time when you could ask a fellow citizen if you can borrow their phone for a minute. I guess that's called a mugging now.
- jstummbillig 4y agoA time where you'd borrow a phone from a stranger "for anonymous communication, say as a whistleblower" rates not as ancient but as fictional.
- godshatter 4y agoI wonder how prevalent "turning someone in for a crime anonymously" was before the pay phones disappeared. Now I'm guessing it's damned near impossible.
- wlesieutre 4y agoThat’s now called “I’d say no because of the scam where they use a premium number and bill you for a very expensive phone call.” If somebody’s phone is dead they can borrow my battery pack.
- Swizec 4y agoI did this recently after a marathon! It took me 10 minutes to remember my girlfriend’s phone number And I had to text. Scam calls have made it far too unlikely that anyone picks up for an unknown number
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 4y agoOne problem is that, if you just keep and maintain "some" payphones, there probably won't be nearly enough to be useful if the cellular infrastructure is out for some reason.
- sophacles 4y agoIt saddens me that you can't think of a use for a communication device that doesn't track your every move in such detail that would make omniscient deities jealous.
- bombcar 4y agoThe call boxes alongside US highways are starting to disappear also - so many people have cell phones and most highways are patrolled at least once a day, so the cost of keeping them working is not worth it as much.
- JJMcJ 4y agoThis is 100% gone for urban freeways in California.
- silisili 4y agoWow... I'd actually forgotten these even ever existed until I read this comment, so I guess you're right... What a blast from the past!
- cwwc 4y agoInterestingly — these call boxes are still prevalent along highways (along with these odd S.0.S. Pull offs every km/ half km or so) throughout much of northern Italy (and if my memory serves.. also in Germany, as of this past fall). I think there may be a a divide between toll/non toll roads tho — curious if anyone knows why this is.
- angstrom 4y agoTime Division Multiplexing (TDM) was the weakest link in the land lines. Since so much traffic has moved off onto wireless I would think there's a lot of reason to use landlines as a reliable emergency line when the towers are overloaded or down. Landlines were reliable for power outages since the power was supplied separately by the phone company and the lines were buried in the ground.
- _jal 4y ago> landlines as a reliable emergency line Unfortunately, carriers are letting POTS rot. It is arguably unreliable now in some places. My grandmother's land line (semi-rural Ohio) goes out every few months and it usually takes a week or so for them to fix it. When we talked to them at one point, they suggested she get a cell phone. Just another example of how planning for quarterly reports causes massive value destruction.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoCame here to say the same thing. Funnily enough I'm in semi-rural Ohio. I see POTS infrastructure all over the place being neglected. Boxes are open to the elements. Spliced cables are just laying out on the ground. I can only imagine the ghosts of old-school telco linemen rolling in their graves over this. I keep meaning to do a deep-dive into public utility regulation here to see if the incumbent telcos are required to maintain that infrastructure. I'd actually have fun going out and photographing/geotagging damaged infrastructure if a court would actually compel the telco to do something about it.
- Analemma_ 4y agoThere are plenty of examples of companies shooting themselves in the foot by only looking at the short term, but this doesn’t seem like one of them. It’s not like investment in POTS is going to pay off in the long run: rural America is depopulating, most households are becoming cellphone only, etc. There’s no positive ROI for POTS out in the countryside no matter what time horizon you look at. The actual fix here is that we have to take a hard look and really decide if this is something worth keeping around. If it is, it needs massive ongoing subsidies. The market alone won’t fix it, because the economics simply aren’t there.
- 908B64B197 4y agoMaybe the true solution is to have more than two providers?
- criddell 4y agoHaven’t pay phones been cell phones for quite a long time now?
- iancmceachern 4y agoYes. I worked in the "street furniture" industry. It used to me Cemusa and another company who's name slips mind. This was decades ago, but still in an Era when people were asking why pay phones still exist. It's the ad revenue. Companies like Cemusa give cities like NYC big money (dozens or hundreds of millions) to buy the right to provide the city with " street furniture" for free, in exchange for the right to sell the ad revenue placed on those pieces of street furniture. This includes pay phones, bus stop shelters, benches, news stands, etc. This dynamic is what caused NYC payphones to exist far beyond their useful life as pay phones. I talk about it on this "being an engineer" podcast I was recently on: https://teampipeline.us/ian-mceachern-engineering-freelancing/ https://teampipeline.us/ian-mceachern-engineering-freelancin...
- selectodude 4y ago>It used to me Cemusa and another company who's name slips mind. JCDecaux is the other one - they actually bought Cemusa a few years ago.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dheera 4y agoThere are emergency phones all over school campuses these days, that only dial emergency service. I do believe cell towers have ways to prioritize emergency number calls if their capacity is reduced, but I'm not sure of the details.
- neartheplain 4y agoAre those emergency telephones, or the "press big button, speak into mic" public safety call posts? Can't order a pizza or call a cab on the latter I'm afraid.
- lizknope 4y agoI'm sure some college kids have tried to use it and classify it as a "pizza emergency"
- V__ 4y agoHow else are you supposed to get the next numbers from the machine?
- JaggerJo 4y agoyup - we definitely need to keep them. Otherwise Samaritan might win.
- stevenwoo 4y agoI live near some mountainous rural terrain. There is no cell coverage in large swaths of valleys so many of the county and state parks have payphones to ensure phone service.
- supertrope 4y agoOn September 11th 2001 people lined up to use payphones because the cellular networks were overloaded.
- satsuma 4y agowere cell phones that common in 2001? i thought payphones were still more commonly used at that point
- supertrope 4y agoNo. They were very expensive because the network had minuscule capacity compared with today. I remember having a consumer plan with a 400 minute per month quota and calls after 9 p.m. were free. Even with those tight limits you'd sometimes place a call and hear a switch message "All circuits are busy."
- epc 4y agoYes, for average business people in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Not unusual for adults to have them, uncommon for students and children to have them.
- Markoff 4y agosounds like BS, I was teenager in quite poor European country, in 1998-1999 I was one of the first two people in my class to have mobile (I've inherited Philips Fizz from father, my rich classmate had some Nokia), by 2001 when I served in military I was switching already two phones per year (I remember it because I traded one of the phones (Siemens) just during the leave in city where were my barracks), in 2001 literally every adult in poor European country except old seniors had already phone and definitely vast majority of teenage students I learned about attacks when visiting netcafe (just some irrelevant foreign news) and then guys in my platoon were listening to radio and even our local TV channel strangely aired CNN footage instead south American telenovela guys watched for pretty girls. we had talk in evening with highest captain or mayor in our barracks in evening, we doubled our shifts to protect installations (guys were happy, at least they had someone to talk to legally during guarding) plus nearby nuclear power plant, first night of 9/11 I spent with unplanned night shift on the fax waiting for instructions from HQ and later was forced to guard as well despite as bureaucrat I should be pretty much exempted from it
- ddeck 4y agoDefinitely. Telstra in Australia recently made all their (15000) payphones free and the CEO specifically called out bushfires and cyclones (hurricanes) as events that have brought the mobile network down: About 11m calls were made across Telstra pay phones in the past year, including 230,000 calls to critical services such as triple zero and Lifeline. The Telstra chief executive, Andrew Penn, said pay phones were a vital lifeline, particularly for the homeless and people escaping an unsafe situation. “I have been moved seeing firsthand queues of people waiting in line to use a payphone to tell their family and friends they’re safe after a bushfire, a cyclone or some other natural disaster has taken the mobile network down,” he said.[1] I believe the existence/number of payphones is mandated by the federal government. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/03/telstra-to-make-public-pay-phone-calls-around-australia-free https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/03/telstra-to-...
- webmobdev 4y agoThat's why I still keep a landline, though the family rarely uses it. It so happened that my family was debating why we need a landline when each of us has one or two mobile connections. Co-incidentally, the next day a major city got flooded. Nearly all the cell towers in the flooded area got knocked out because the generators / UPS of the towers all conked out. Only the wired landlines worked. We all voted to keep the landline. (It also turned out to be a blessing because in some forms of the US embassy, landline is a required field).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- s5300 4y ago> Are there any situations where it would be desirable to keep some payphones around? If you happen to find yourself running from somebody named Mr. Anderson…
- the_only_law 4y agoI had an issue a while back where my mobile service got cut off and in the most well thought out support system I’ve seen, I needed to make a phone call to resolve it. At first I couldn’t find anyone who’d allow me to make a call real quick. Luckily the phone worked fine and I still had wifi and was able to use Google voice, but if pay phones were still a thing I may have reached for one.