Payphones: Would You Care If They Became Extinct?

... do you still use payphones at all? i do! i don't make that many calls and in most cases it's much more economical for me to use a payphone than put money on my pay-as-you-go cell phone. unfortunately they're removing the payphones in my town thus there are only a couple left ...

... do you like the convenience of knowing that there are payphones around to use? or do you care about payphones at all? would you care if they disappeared for good?

... comments?

 

Even if I needed one, I wouldn't know where to find one other than perhaps at the airport. They are already practically extinct to me.

 

I have a cell phone but I find that occasionally I have to use a pay phone. My preference would be to have payphones in all essential service buildings (ie. Hospitals) and in malls and indoor places (hotels, restaurants, etc.). Because of their high maintenance costs/vandalism, I can see outdoor phone booths becoming obsolete. They should keep payphones around because not everyone has/can afford cell phones or in case of emergencies or if your cell battery dies, to name a few reasons.

 

... i concur and thank you for your reply. i really hope they don't eliminate payphones altogether where i live because i still use them. i think they might be on the way out like the dinosaur though ...

 

Don't use them much but I know where they are.

 

You're welcome. On a side note, because of their high costs, would people be willing to pay more per call, in order to keep the pay phones around? I would be willing to pay $1 a call just to keep the pay phones alive.

 

... to tell you the truth, i think most people don't care about payphones anymore, it's all about cell phones these days. but regarding your price proposal, personally i'd be willing to pay two or three dollars for a local call, it wouldn't bother me and it'd still be cheaper than the minimum $20 i have to pay to put airtime on my pay-as-go cell phone which i rarely use ...

 

I don't use the pay phone but pay phone should still be there for people without cell phones to make emergency calls and for situations in a natural disasters when cell phone networks are down.

 

... good points. thanks for your reply ...

... i think part of the problem is that the company operating payphones, in british columbia anyway, is also in the cell phone business. they'd probably like to see all phone users moving to cell phones instead of using payphones. there could be a bit of a conflict of interest there ...

 

Non-cellular networks are susceptible to natural disasters as well. A downed network line can take down pay phones as well.

As people rely more and more on cellular networks, I would expect phone companies will endeavour to make them more and more reliable. Traditional phone networks have had redundancies built into them and improved over the years. Cellular networks are newer and until fairly recently, have not had such a boom in popularity rivalling land line networks. I would expect better and better redundancy will be built into cellular networks as time goes by.

 

Nah...we'd just go back to smoke signals or African tom-toms. Or maybe Atlantean mental telepathy.

 

... lol!