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Comment by yabones | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Yes. 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-freelancin...

>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.

Definitely. 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-...

Time 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.

> 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.

Came 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.

There 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.

This isn't just a rural problem. I live in a city that is home base to a major regional telco. They wouldn't deploy fiber and let their copper rot. I had 4Mb DSL some years back that went bad so I was moved to a new pair that could only manage 2Mb despite being relatively close to the CO. These companies DGAF.

Telcos have been given free resources from the government for decades to maintain rural infrastructure. ROI never entered into in the first place.

Even 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.

Except they (more specifically, ads) pay for themselves.

This 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.

The 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.

Interestingly — 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.

Wow... 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!

This is 100% gone for urban freeways in California.

They have them on the freeways in LA

Hmm, didn't notice. In Bay Area, definitely gone.

Or 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.

I keep a small printout in my wallet with 20 phone numbers just for that situation.

It was common for phone booths to have copies of the yellow and white pages, though it was also common for people to just go in and tear up the pages

I 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.

pay 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.

Wow 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.

A time where you'd borrow a phone from a stranger "for anonymous communication, say as a whistleblower" rates not as ancient but as fictional.

I 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.

That’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.

I 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

NYC has these kiosks now https://www.link.nyc/

Which, if they are cellular based don't solve for the problem, but I suspect some are hardwired?

They have fiber backhaul since they are high-volume public wifi access points. I'd bet the phone tablet on the front is VoIP.

One 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.

That'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).

On September 11th 2001 people lined up to use payphones because the cellular networks were overloaded.

Though I really like the idea of having some backup infrastructure already for those discussed simple cases like (top comment for example): car broke down and you.. .. forgot your mobile .. out of battery .. out of "credit" (in case of prepaid) .. cuz you got robbed .. cuz you got raped....(!) .. cuz you lost your fingertips and can't operate a touch display anymore.. .. possibilties are hopefully rare but endless but you're just in whatever emergency at 3 am and really need a to make a call!

But just for curiosity, whom/where you wanna call in 2022++ in case of overloaded networks like Sep. 11th in 2001. At least I didn't even "own" (actually set-up) my landline anymore.

were cell phones that common in 2001? i thought payphones were still more commonly used at that point

No. 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."

Yes, 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.

sounds 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

In 2001 the US was at about 45 cell phones per 100 adults according to the ITU and statista.com (which may be the same dataset). Some other sites put it at 38% but unclear if total population or just US adults.

Regardless, hardly ubiquitous.

according this roughly 50% of European population had phone including seniors and children, so it pretty much confirms what I said that all adults except old people had phone including plenty of teenagers, Americas way behind Europe, but I guess US avg would be much higher than South America

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Regional-and-global-cell...

It 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.

I 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.

There 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.

Are 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.

I'm sure some college kids have tried to use it and classify it as a "pizza emergency"

How else are you supposed to get the next numbers from the machine?

yup - we definitely need to keep them. Otherwise Samaritan might win.

From earlier comments: https://www.link.nyc/ Each station allows free US calls.

Maybe the true solution is to have more than two providers?

> 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…

Haven’t pay phones been cell phones for quite a long time now?

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