The widespread use of cellphones may signal the end for the cultural icon, which is being yanked off the street at increasing pace
Tucson, Arizona Monday, 12 August 2002
Scripps Howard
http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/20812gonzo.phones.html
"Every person who gets a cellphone is one less who tosses a quarter in
a pay phone,'' says one observer of the pay phone's gradual exit from the communication
scene. This booth is on a Washington street.
By Jessica Wehrman
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
It's a grubby dinosaur on a busy city street, abused, ignored, maligned. Sit there an hour, maybe two, and no one pays it any mind. Instead, passers-by chatter away on cellphones.
Does anyone love the pay phone anymore?
Having reached the pinnacle of popularity in the late 1990s, when 2.6 million operated nationally, only 1.7 million pay phones remain.
BellSouth had 143,000 pay phones in nine states when it announced in February 2001 it was getting out of the pay phone business. A year and a half later, BellSouth has only 103,000 left - it wants to be rid of them by the end of 2003.
Elsewhere, phones are being yanked out of small towns and remote locations. A pay phone in the Mojave Desert - which inspired tribute Web sites - is gone.
Don't look for them to vanish today or tomorrow. But telecommunications analysts say someday, maybe 10 years from now, maybe 20, the pay phone may follow the rotary-dial phone and the party line to the great phone booth in the sky.
Victim of cellphones
They were undercut by flashy little cellphones: hand-held, pocket-size creations, some that even allow users to send e-mail or surf the Internet. According to the Federal Communications Commission, 122.4 million cellular phones were in use in December 2001. By many estimates, more than 60 percent of households have at least one cellphone.
How can a pay phone - bulky, immobile and often broken - compete?
Not well, according to Atlanta telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan.
"Every person who gets a cellphone is one less person who tosses a quarter in a pay phone," he said.
Kagan predicts pay phones will try to keep up with gee-whiz Internet access and data ports for computers. Then, he says, they will go away.
"But that's many, many years from now," he adds.
The first sign of extinction: the slow disappearance of phone booths. Clark Kent, alas, has nowhere left to change his clothes.
The second: the disappearance of pay phones from low-use areas. Instead, they're kept at necessary areas, such as subway stations and airports, where folks call to get picked up or relay when they'll be home for dinner.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, about 5.5 million households lack telephones. For them, dropping a quarter or two in a pay phone slot is a necessity.
Elsewhere, battered women use them to escape. The Amish often count on them as their only usable phone. And in areas without cellphone service, pay phones are a necessity. On Sept. 11, when cellular phone systems locked up, pay phones helped some assure loved ones of their safety.
Craig Stephens, vice president of sales for Verizon Public Communications, said the pay phone market has lost money because of calling cards that enabled users to choose their long-distance carriers. Deregulation also flooded the market with too many pay phones.
"Here for many years to come"
Verizon responded by experimenting with prices, removing unprofitable phones and asking site owners to subsidize pay phones.
"Verizon would not be as aggressive in the market if we didn't feel pay phones are going to be here for many years to come," Stephens said.
Vince Sandusky, president of the American Public Communications Council, representing independent pay phone operators, believes pay phones will always be necessary.
"The argument that they're going away doesn't hold water," he said.
The cultural effects will be more than a lack of coin-operated phones. Pay phone conversations are easily ignored. Cellphone conversations aren't.
"We all hear more than we ever wanted to know about other people's business," said Kagan, calling on his cellphone from the beach.
"I'm trying to talk quietly," he added.
In rural hamlets, some fight for their not-so-profitable pay phones.
Town rallied behind its pay phone
Acworth, N.H., is a rural community of 800 where delivery trucks rarely venture and resident Charlie Bradt claims "if you get here, you get here by accident."
When Verizon threatened to shut down the town's only pay phone - a Superman-style phone booth - it united a community typically too disparate to come together for anything.
"You can't ask for a more diverse cross-section of people," said Bradt, who works in the South Acworth Village Store. "We can't get a groundswell or a group of people on anything . . . except drunks. We've got a couple of those."
The town argued that having the phone was a safety issue, and that the town was outside of cellphone service areas. It won.
So now that the Acworth phone booth is here to stay, it's more popular than ever. Right?
"Oh, it's not used that much," Bradt said. "Maybe four or five times a day."
Phone numbers
* The advent of the portable cellphone has undercut the use of the pay phone.
PAY PHONES IN USE
1.7 million
NOW
2.6 million
AT LATE '90S PEAK
CELLPHONES IN USE
122.4 million
DECEMBER 2001
HOUSEHOLDS WITHOUT PHONES
5.5 million
Source: Federal Communications Commission
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