Last call for the phone booth? | Hacker News Reader

Last call for the phone booth?

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39 pointswalterbell54 comments

In 90's Finland took a steep dive in an index describing how technically advanced a country is. Turns out, amount of telephone booths per capita was in important part of the index. As the country was already transforming to mobile phones, it was the index that had become outdated.

One ongoing use of payphones: people with cheap, pay-by-the-minute cell phone plans calling toll-free numbers for utilities, banks, etc. so they don't have to use up their airtime while they're on hold.

About two years ago I was in Chicago and noticed a well-maintained payphone. The company that operated it had even attached a decal with the toll free numbers for Comcast, Bank of America, the local electric company, etc.

Here is a weird little blip in those pre-paid cell phone plans: They generally charge the user for the minutes used when calling a toll-free number. Same for incoming calls.

I have always used pre-paid, mostly by the minute (though not always), because it winds up generally cheaper than any of the plans they offer as I don't use it much and never have. It was never really an issue with some companies, but I'd use a google Talk number for companies that tended to put places on hold.

This stuff didn't change until I switched countries: I'm pretty sure toll-free numbers are actually toll-free and I no longer get charged for incoming calls/texts, which means my pre-paid time lasts longer.

I don't know if it's still a thing so much these days, they always used to be used likewise for international calling using a cheap international calling card. Make an untimed local call to the international call provider, they then use VOIP or something to route the call to the destination country, and turn it back to another untimed local call. Great for calling family back home when backpacking.

I'm not sure exactly how long it will be before pay phones are gone completely, but their density has been decreasing for nearly two decades now:

1998 - http://www.channelpartnersonline.com/articles/1998/12/paypho...

2002 - http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace/requiem_for_the_pay_pho...

2008 - http://www.phonelosers.org/2008/09/pay-phones-are-doomed/

2010 - http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/gadgets-electronics/questions/...

2010 - http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/02/pay.phones.irpt/

2011 - http://www.phonelosers.org/2011/04/alternative-uses-for-pay-...

2017 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/objec... (Some are even ready to say they're already dead.)

From the perspective of computer history, pay phones are interesting because of their being the main host for phreaking subcultures. The best book on such is still probably Lapsley's Exploding The Phone:

http://explodingthephone.com/

I'm just going to take a moment to say that Sunday Morning on CBS has been one of my favorite news programs since...well as long as I've been watching television. It was usually on before we went to church in the morning when I was a kid, I'd catch one every now and then in high school, and I later would put it on my DVR because I tended to sleep through the early morning slot in college. I'm actually super excited to learn that they host segments on their website and I think I know what I'll be binging on this week. Also super glad Mo Rocca is still with them, it really entertained me that they hired him after his tenure with The Daily Show (he was one of my favorite correspondents) and he's put out some great segments on the show since. Alright, trip down Nostalgia Lane over.

You're not alone, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy that you feel this way.

I travel a lot for work - currently in Melbourne - and while this will probably sound absurd, the most poignant reminder that I'm not back home is that I can't watch CBS Sunday Morning with coffee and the Boston Globe on Sunday Morning. In my later years of college, and through my early professional life, that was simply what we did on Sunday. When it was over, it was only 10:30 and we could still go do brunch or have a day somewhere, but 9 - 10:30 was scheduled time in our apartment. And god help you if you spoke during the 'moment of nature' at the end of the show...

In Australia the leading telco is making all the phone booths (at least in sydney where I live) into wifi hotspots for its internet customers - clever - pay for your home internet and have wifi wherever you are - maybe nice in areas where there is not good mobile reception, for mobile workers etc

It'd certainly be nicer if, like a phone booth, they let people who aren't members of said network connect for five minutes by putting a quarter into a machine, so that they could then use said wi-fi to, say, make a (VoIP) call.

That'd be an expensive machine! Take a look some time at the amount of design, machining, and just plain material that goes into pay phones, in the cause of defending against theft from their coin boxes - they're called "fortress phones" for good reason.

You basically can, once you connect you can just pay using card . also integrates with FON so if you're from overseas you can use that.

Comcast does this with their customers' cable modems (every cable modem broadcasts a Comcast network that any Comcast customer can use). It's somewhat evil and clever because it encourages you to use Comcast over and equivalent service because of the Internet access you get while out and about. They've given choosing an ISP a network effect.

You can turn that hotspot off on your own device: https://www.xfinity.com/support/internet/disable-xfinity-wif...

The ones that are connected to fibre are great. Free 200Mbit connection! But then there's the ADSL ones...

For some unbeknown reason, a telephone company installed three new phone boxes on the high street in my town last month. Two are no more than 100 yards from each other. My cynical theory is that they are being used to track footfall using wifi connections (but I have nothing to prove that). Very odd considering most councils are aiming to reduce the amount of 'street furniture'.

It strikes me that we kindof still have phone booths. They've just moved inside open-plan offices, in the form of "huddle rooms" and the like.

They removed the phone booth from across my apartment a couple years ago, I may have been the last person to use it, but only because I had locked my keys and phone in my apartment - I understand they can't keep them running for that, but it was really useful.

I've been to a couple private clubs where cell phones are banned, except for in the phone booths that were installed 50+ years ago, sort of odd to see them disappearing everywhere, but then staying oddly relevant in random places

Was contracted to do work at the Greenwich country club and this was the case. No cell phones allowed or you'll be thrown off the premises (seriously) but they did have one old phone booth where you could go in and use your phone. This included texting. Not allowed to be seen otherwise.

That's wasn't the strangest thing there... those types of places are like stepping into another world.

We haven't done it yet, but my boss has mused about the idea of installing "phone booths" in our office where people can take personal calls without hogging up our one conference room.

Give them offices, that would be far preferable.

“I walked past this phone booth every day with my kid when he was three years old,” Ackerman said. “And at a certain point, he said to me, ‘Why is that phone in a box?’ And I realized that he didn’t know what a phone booth was, which is so bizarre!”

I am constantly amazed at peoples lack of awareness of time. Of course a 3 year old in 2017 wouldn't know what the hell a phone booth was. How could that possibly surprise you. I bet this person also sees a celebrity they haven't seen for twenty years and then says something insightful like "wow, he looks so old!".

It's easy to be dismissive until it happens to you. A friend was playing with her sister's kid and went "brrring! brrring!" to imitate a telephone call. The kid put her hand up to her ear, completely flat, and said "Hello?"

(The old way to play telephone is to answer it by putting your pinkie to your mouth and your thumb to your ear. But of course, phones haven't been shaped like that in a long time.)

Anecdotally, in addition, kids don't really understand the meaning of "hanging up" a phone anymore, they just hit the red button.

I had to explain to a ~16 year old why it was called "dialing".

My parents didn't get rid of their rotary phone until the late 90s. Growing up, I always found it funny when my friends didn't know how to use it

My friend's parents were the same -- they did it on principle because the telco charged for touch tone. Never mind that it cost the telco substantially more to continue supporting the "rotary" infrastructure, I'm sure it was a cash cow.

I remember being awed by their new PC with its amazingly fast 9600 baud modem. And then it dialed out. ATDP. Tick. Tick tick tick. ....

I remember how it felt so high tech when putting in the number using beeppy buttons instead of the rotary dial !

My parents didn't get rid of theirs until about 5 or so years ago - I can't remember if it was because of the switch to a cell phone or their smaller house as they happened around the same time. I got to the point as a teenager that I tried to avoid using the phone to dial because it seemed so inconvenient.

People are surprised because we don't go around constantly thinking through the consequences of every change around us, because most of the time they are not important. Of course it is not that suprising once we've thought about it.

The point is that this is one of those little things most people won't have thought about, not least because most adults are still blind to phone booths: It's part of the landscape to us, and not something we're likely to think much about when we pass them.

People gloss over details all the time. As a case in point: it wasn't the author of the linked article written in 2017 that walked past the phone booth with his 3 year old, it was author Peter Ackerman who used it as inspiration for his childrens book. The book was published in 2010, but it's not clear when he wrote it or when he received the inspiration to do so.

Can't help but be reminded of The Adventures of Pete & Pete - The Call. All revolves around a payphone out in the middle of nowhere.

> revolves around a payphone out in the middle of nowhere

It was a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_phone_booth

The President's Analyst seems so prophetic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jEiTxg21q8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PebCB0IIANI

I was in Norway last summer. They had a number of phone booths standing around. They don't work, but they have some signs that they are under some kind of cultural heritage protection or something alike. I found that kinda nice.

I was homeless for about a month. Literally on the streets. There were a few payphones nearby, which worked.

Wouldn't have been able to contact anyone otherwise, at least to talk. Luckily the library nearby let use a pass for an hour's internet access each day, which I mainly used to contact people and find services and such.

Would be a shame to have them go fully extinct. Just like it would be a shame if all water fountains suddenly disappeared too. I wouldn't have made it out of that situation without them both.

Near me in the UK countryside, a lot of the phone boxes are being used to house AEDs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_external_defibrillat...).

I've been wondering if everyone should carry a backup phone now that there are so few phone booths? We seem so dependent on them and don't really plan for what to do if it dies or gets lost/stolen.

I don't know what I would do if I ended up somewhere far from home without a phone.

I do this, not just for connectivity but also because frequently I am not near an Apple store or in a city where such is not 24/7. If I break my iPhone at 22:00 on a Saturday, I am capital-f fucked.

In addition to my daily driver 7+, I keep the previous gen (6S+ presently) on me with a different carrier, and a 5C in my bag as an emergency spare.

Next year the 7+ will become the backup and the 7S+/8+ will go in my pocket, and I'll sell the 6S+.

Curious why you need to be so hyper connected?

I know people who live their lives without phones at all and I'm perfectly fine going days at a time without a phone.

I run three businesses and a lot of people depend on me in emergencies. Not many people can do what I do, and fewer yet can do it on the notice that I can.

If everyone has a phone can't you just ask another person to borrow theirs or make a call for help in an emergency?

Now that you say that I feel like cell phones now need to have a "guest mode" web browser, maps and phone, but everything else walled off

If you run Android, that is a feature on recent versions (Marshmallow and up seems to have it - it might go older, I can't look).

I have actually put my phone into guest mode to lend it to people at the office.

My biggest concern if I let someone borrow my phone in a busy public space is that they will run off with it.

Perhaps the guest mode should primarily be a means of preventing a thief from doing anything meaningful with a stolen phone. It should probably restrict the 'guest' to only using the phone mode and prevent the phone from being placed into airplane mode so that if it is stolen it can more likely be tracked and recovered.

On recent android versions you can allow calling from the lock screen. So just lock your phone and switch to the dialer before handing it over.

Here in the UK the red phone booths are such a cultural symbol that they tend to stay around, but it's rare to see one with a phone inside. Villages get creative in finding uses for their phone both. I have seem them used as a mini-library or housing a defibrillator.

Not all phone boxes in the UK are red. In Hull and the surrounding area they are cream-coloured, they are run by the local phone outfit Kcom. Their use for making calls is declining just like everywhere else.

How am I going to Hack The Planet now?

Your choice: a refrigerator or a bathroom weigh scale.

Go with security cameras. Higher bandwidth connection for more pwning abilities.

Yes, this is a payphone...

...don't ask.

End of an era. I used to love looking up numbers via the Payphone Project[1] and just talking to randoms.

[1] http://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/

I thought they were already all gone, but I guess I put too much stock into the opening of 2002's Phone Booth

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