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Why We Should Care That Payphones Are Going Extinct

By crooky | September 5, 2008

While working in a public space at the University of British Columbia’s downtown Vancouver campus earlier this week, I was confronted by a very distraught young man who needed to find a payphone. He’d been looking for 20 minutes. I was in fact sitting where there had once been a payphone just six months prior. Where did it go? When I asked someone from the University, they said “Telus just came by one day and ripped them all out. They didn’t even phone us to tell us they were going to do that.”

This isn’t an isolated incident. Payphones are going the way of the Dodo at a rapid pace across North America and there are some serious consequences. Before we get into that, let’s look at why payphones are being removed from public spaces:

In 1997, there were over two million payphones in the US and I am sure there were much more than that before the advent of the cell phone in the mid-1980s. Today, there are just over a million payphones in the US. In Canada, payphones are dissapearing more slowly than they are in the US - at a rate of about 4% annually but the rate at which they are being removed has increased dramatically in the last few years.

Why are they being removed? They’re owned and operated by telephone companies and the telephone companies say the profitability on payphones has been dropping an average of 17% per year for years and they want to get out of the market completely before it becomes a money pit for the company.

While payphones have been disappearing, cell phone ownership has been soaring. In 1984, there were only 92,000 cell phone owners in the entire US. Now there’s almost 250 million - almost one for every man, woman and child in that country. Canada has similar penetration rates. Prices on phones and airtime have been dropping like stones. You may soon be able to buy disposable cell phones with air time out of vending machines. This, the telephone companies have argued, is what’s killing the market for pay phones and I can’t find fault with their assessment of the situation from a business perspective.

However, like most things, there is more at stake than money whenever you decide to stop offering a service completely. Here are my two biggest concerns:

1. Low-income individuals

Granted, cell phone adoption rates are high. As a society, we’ve come to accept that cell phones are an integral part of our lives. We suck up the $30-75/month that a cell phone plan costs for the convenience.

For some families - even $30/month is too much. Growing up in the 80s in BC, there were times when the economy wasn’t doing so good. My Dad works in an industry that is closely tied to the lumber industry and when the lumber industry is in the toilet (which it is, periodically), my Dad’s company was in trouble.

There was a period of several years where my family was very low income. My dad worked several paper routes to keep food on the table but I can’t imagine us being able to afford a cell phone.

So what? Why do poor people need to use the phone? Lots of reasons. What if you’re stranded somewhere? What if you can’t find someone that you need to meet? What if you need to call an ambulance? For most of us, that’s not a big concern because we can always pick up our cell phones and call for help. For some, a payphone is their only choice. Think about it - if a perfect stranger came up to you and asked to borrow your cell phone to make a call, would you let them? Most people wouldn’t. It’s like asking someone if you can use their toothbrush.

There will always be a need for payphones amongst the economically disadvantaged and no, it’s not a popular market but there are social implications associated with setting this group adrift.

2. Natural Disasters

Here in Vancouver, we like to pretend that natural disasters are things that happen to other people. We live on a gigantic fault line! At some point, the earth is going to try and toss Vancouver into the sea. Most geologists agree it’s a matter of “when”, not “if”.

During my undergrad at Simon Fraser University, I had the priviledge of working with the good people at the Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST). This group specializes in telecommunications research and policy. Several researchers there specialize in disaster communications management and here’s their take on cell phones during a natural disaster: they’re not going to work.

One of two things is likely to happen during a disaster:

- everyone is going to call their loved ones when the dust settles to see if they’re alright and crash the cell network (it happens everytime the major fireworks competition happens here in the summer. As soon as the fireworks end, everyone tries to call someone on their cell and the system goes down), OR

- the physical infrastructure of the cellular network will be damaged and no one will be able to make calls.

Sure, hard line telephones are also susceptible to physical damage but they’re a lot harder to overload with calls than the cellular networks. I think it’s a good idea to have a minimum number of payphones around to facilitate communication during a disaster.

At the end of the day, the telephone market is de-regulated in North America so no one can force phone companies to keep providing a service that bleeds money. In 2007, AT&T announced that it was going to sell off the last 60,000 payphones it was operating in the US and I wouldn’t be surprized to see telephone companies in Canada do the same in the near future.

There are smaller, independent companies that operate modest payphone networks that may pick up where the big telephone companies leave off but I believe that payphones are on the verge of dissapearing outside of trainstations and airports.

For more information on payphones and the payphone market, check out The Payphone Project.

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Topics: Policy, Technology, social issues |

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