What are we going to do with all those public phone booths?

There’s a fascinating article in Quartz about the future of New York’s next generation of public payphones after City Hall request for tenders. Among the contenders are companies like Google, Verizon, IBM, Cisco, Samsung, and some 50 others, among them failed Gowex.

What is payphone for these days? At a time when just about everybody carries a cellphone, the idea of supplying a city like New York with a public telephone network seems somewhat outdated, and can’t even be justified on the grounds of socio-demographics: a cellphone is the first thing that undocumented migrants acquire when they cross the border.

Over the last two decades, phone booths have taken on the aspect of reminders from another age, and are only used in emergencies, or when the cellphone network collapses. The network of just under 9,000 payphones in New York were used for around 27 million calls in 2011; that’s around eight calls per cabin a day. In purely economic terms, it would seem clear that neither the phone companies nor city councils—New York City Hall receives around one third of revenue from pay phones—are getting much out of this. As a place to stick advertisements, they are of greater use: New York City Hall earned almost $16 million from them last year.

That said, a system of this kind in strategic locations throughout a city could have many uses. They could be used to provide WiFi, or for emergency calls… it’s pretty clear that something useful can be done to make use of this infrastructure.

Interestingly enough, some people think that city councils could run into opposition from the major operators if they tried using payphones as free WiFi transmission points, effectively creating city-wide coverage. In fact, that one used to be the major concern for operators some years ago, I even suffered it when discussing a similar proposal for the city of Madrid back in 2005. Now, things are different. Operators desperately want to take some load off their networks, and WiFi is the great hope for them. No users would cancel their data plans in today’s world just because they have access to a WiFi network deployed in payphones… it is just not practical and not trustworthy enough. Therefore, it could be a nice way to offload their antennas in some busy places, and keep their customers satisfied.

But aside from the obvious use of providing connectivity, other proposals include electronic information booths, emergency services, or advertising, although some countries have used them to house defibrillators.

What is your city or area’s public phone network like? Any ideas on how to put underused booths to work?

(En español, aquí)