The Death of Payphones Could Kill Us All

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If there’s anything Hurricane Sandy taught us, is that despite our amazing advances in technology, we’re still subject to the might of Mother Nature.

If it wasn't for coin operated payphones, many people in the affected areas of the largest superstorm to hit North America would never have been able to call for help. About 30,000 to 40,000 people just in New Jersey are homeless. Cell towers and power lines are still non-functional in many large urban centres  due to flooding.

Let the lone payphone saved the day – enabling people to reach out to their friends, family and colleagues, even if just for a moment, to let us know they are still alive.

Without the lone payphone, many would still be worried sick, wondering if their son, daughter, mom, dad, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or best friend survived one of the worst natural disasters ever.

But the lone payphone is dying.

It’s been on the most endangered tech watch list for some time.

Since the first mobile telephone call in St. Louis Missouri on June 17, 1946 by three Bell Labs scientists, the  payphone's days have been numbered. Ironically, there wasn't much interest in the initial concept of being able to make a phone call from anywhere – the suits and ties didn't think anyone would be interested in chatting on the phone while walking their dog, driving their car, or any of the many things we do today.

Boy were they wrong. These days, it’s almost impossible to get a word in unless you are texting, tweeting or talking on a mobile device.

And mobile devices are no longer restricted to just cell and smartphones – tablets, mini-tablets, music players, even laptops to a lesser degree are all ways we stay connected when out and about.

Our mobile digital world has slowly been strangling payphones – many shopping malls across North America have been ripping them out, to make space for more public seating space, more retail store space, or even more signage space for billboards and posters.

The last refuge of the payphone – the corner gas station – is even turning away this now out-dated mode of communications.

I remember when I was a kid, and I’d go up with my uncle to the family cottage. We’d always stop off at the gas station at the top of the hill just as we entered town. My uncle would hand me a quarter, tell me to call ahead to see if they needed us to pickup anything, while he’d fill up the gas tank.

For as long as cars have been on the road, there have been payphones at gas stations. Whether it was to call ahead or call for help, if you were out and needed to make a call, you knew that there was always a payphone at a gas station.

Not anymore – most gas stations have nixed their payphones, replacing them with places to get hot coffee.

And the number of payphones in Canada could be cut by about 25 percent if the big and bullying phone companies don’t get their way.

Bell Canada is threatening the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) – the Canadian government’s federal regulator on such things – that if they aren’t allowed to increase the cost of a payphone call from 50 cents to a whole buck, they’ll be forced to remove payphones from the system to offset rising costs.

Phone and cable companies in Canada have used this strong-arm tactic before – and won – to get more money. Whenever they want to raise rates, they always threaten the government with reductions in service if they don’t get their way.

They did this only a handful of years back, when they wanted to increase cable rates claiming the cost of providing communications technologies to the northern parts of the country were forcing them to raise costs across the board. They threatened that if they didn’t get their rate increase, they’d just delay or stop outright providing new technologies in the north. Essentially they threatened to cut off Canada’s north from the digital revolution sweeping across the world.

Freakin’ bullies.

If the communications giants like Bell Canada don’t get to raise the cost of dialing a payphone, they could disappear like dinosaurs.

And as global warming, climate change, solar storms, and other natural phenomenon which is beyond any of our control increases the likelihood of superstorms, we could find ourselves in dire situations, without a means of calling for help.

Scientists are predicting an increase in earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadic activity, and even snow and ice storms, because of changes they've been monitoring here on Earth, and out in space from satellites, and the International Space Station.

So at a time when we may need an old, out-dated form of communication – the lone payphone – we may not be able to find one.