The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
S2E19 - Ten Cents to Anywhere
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Payphones were infrastructure until they weren't. They weren't missed until they were.
At their peak there were about two and a half million of them in America, one on what felt like every corner, and a dime got you anyone in the country. By 2018 there were about a hundred thousand left, most of them dead. The first one turned up in a Hartford bank in 1889. The last public one in Manhattan left ceremoniously in 2022, with a press release, like a retiring quarterback.
In between, the booth became a cultural object (Superman changed in one, every spy movie needed one). Drug crews turned payphones into open-air offices, so cities pulled the phones out of the neighbourhoods that leaned on them hardest. Then the cell phone showed up and the whole thing fell over in about a decade.
We'd decided a fire hydrant was a public good and a payphone was a business. When the business stopped paying, the phones came down, starting with the corners that could least afford to lose them. Then Katrina knocked out the cell towers, and the payphones still bolted to the wall had lines of people waiting at them. Turns out the thing you last cursed at for eating your quarter was was doing a job you'd written off years ago.
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I want to tell you about a piece of infrastructure that was simultaneously one of the most important technologies in everyday American life and one of the most taken for granted. I feel like we say that a lot. The payphone. We do. Not the payphone, right? Not the object, exactly, though the object has its own history worth tracing. The concept, the idea that in any city, on any corner, at any hour of the day or night, there was this device you could just walk up to, put in a coin, and call anyone in the country. Or the world. Or the world, to be honest, right? You were never more than a few blocks away from the ability to reach the world. That public communication was woven into the physical fabric of the city, the way fire hydrants and streetlights are as infrastructure. Not a product you subscribe to, infrastructure you move through.
Marc:We talk a lot about those pieces of tech that turn into, like, there's something you can hold and feel, and now it's subscription. Well, I guess payphones were sort of a one-time subscription.
Renee:Well, it was token-based.
Marc:Yeah, token-based.
Renee:It was token-based usage.
Marc:Well, I mean, living in the UK, right? I mean, you look at all of the pay phones is like a, it's, it's a cultural institution, right? The red box, the telephone box, like, you know, they're still hanging around. At its peak in the mid-1990s, the United States had somewhere around two and a half-ish million payphones. That's roughly one payphone for every hundred people at the time, distributed across virtually every populated area of the country, in train stations and airports and hotel lobbies and hospital corridors and gas stations and laundromats and the lobbies of office buildings and on street corners and neighborhoods where a few other services were reliably present. I remember as a kid, there was a bank of phones, Disneyland.
Renee:Hotels that have them too, right? Just a bank of phones, right? Yeah, with a chair, like a little chair sitting in front of it.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, exactly. The maintenance and operation of that network represented an ongoing investment by the telecommunications industry. The revenue it generated, roughly a billion dollars annually at the peak, was sufficient to make that investment economically rational.
Renee:By 2018, the number of payphones in the United States had fallen roughly to 100,000, a 96% decline in roughly 20 years because a technology arrived that did what the payphones did and many other things besides. And the economic logic that had sustained the network simply just evaporated. The payphone is one of the cleanest examples in technology history of a network that was genuinely critical public infrastructure and was allowed to disappear almost entirely because the market stopped supporting it, leaving behind a set of equity and emergency preparedness questions that we still haven't fully answered.
Marc:Yeah. The Hurricane Katrina example is the one that made those questions visible in the kind of just most stark possible terms. When the storm hit in August 2005, cell towers were damaged or destroyed, and backup power failed, and cell networks in the affected areas were largely non-functional for days and even weeks. The payphones that remained operational, the ones that were connected to hardwired landline infrastructure that survived the storm, became critical communication lifelines. They also became visible illustrations of how thoroughly the payphone network had already been allowed to deteriorate in low-income areas because those were precisely the neighborhoods where payphone removal had been concentrated in the preceding years because, of course, it was.
Renee:Because, of course, it was. We see that a lot, too. We're going to trace the whole arc from the coin-operated telephone booth that appears in Hartford, Connecticut in 1889 To the design language of the phone booth as a cultural object To the phone booth as a crime staging ground that police and phone companies spent decades trying to manage To the specific moment when the cellular network crosses the tipping point And the economic foundation of the payphone disappears To what gets left behind and who bears the cost of that disappearance It's a story about infrastructure and equity and what happens when we let the market decide what counts as a public good. We'll pay attention to that.
Marc:Yeah, exactly. We should do an episode about that. You know, just, you know, like we did with the ethics episode, you know, like just pick three or four examples of, you know, different types of infrastructure that, you know. I like that. Yeah. It didn't get deployed equitably or, you know, was removed, you know, in an inequitable fashion. I like that. There's so many of those stories that, like, the poor communities are the ones that suffer because the technology...
Renee:Well, they don't have internet. Like, there's one. They don't have internet. Like, why is that a thing? Like, why don't they have high-speed internet? Like, that's, yeah, we should do that.
Marc:Yeah, we should do that. That'd be a good one. Anyways, okay, so, back to the payphone. But even earlier now, the telephone itself was invented in 1876. You know, okay, so, I love early telephone history, because, of course...
Renee:You nerd.
Marc:Well, I worked for this Japanese company, Enritsu, and... They lay claim to the first practical wireless telephone in 1914 or something like that, which, you know, you think about wireless telecommunications and it doesn't happen for a long time. But, you know, so anyways, I love this kind of early stuff, just like I love some of the early Edison stuff. But early telephone service requires a dedicated line from the subscriber's location to the telephone exchange. Remember group, what is it, the party lines?
Renee:You just pick a finger all on it.
Marc:Yeah. You have the connection to the telephone exchange, monthly rental fees for the equipment, and operators to complete calls manually. It's not cheap, it's not simple, and it's definitively not public. The idea that ordinary people without telephone service should be able to make calls from a shared public device doesn't emerge immediately. It takes about a decade for the industry to recognize that there's a market for occasional telephone access among people who don't have and can't afford a subscription service.
Renee:So William Gray, a Hartford inventor, installed what's generally recognized as the first coin-operated telephone in the Hartford Bank in 1889. Gray's system used a coin detector to verify payment and connects to the telephone exchange in a normal way. The Hartford Telephone Company licenses the technology and deploys coin phones in public locations. And guess what? That model worked. People who need to make occasional calls and don't have telephone service pay per call. The telephone company generates revenue from infrastructure they were already operating, and public telephone access becomes economically self-sustaining rather than a charity service. Within a few years, coin-operated phones are appearing in hotels, drugstores, and other public locations across the Northeast.
Marc:The telephone booth as a kind of an architectural form emerges in the 1890s and becomes standardized through the early 20th century. The booth serves a specific functional purpose, acoustic isolation. Early telephone transmission quality is poor enough that the background noise significantly degrades call quality. And a booth that physically separates the call from ambient environment of a train station or a hotel lobby or whatever makes the call significantly more intelligible. You know what? I remember pay phones, and they were always sounding crappy, even if, you know, it didn't matter if you're in a booth or not.
Renee:I can't imagine the kind of gross stuff that was in that receiver blocking your voice. Like, I don't even want to talk about it. It's probably so gross.
Marc:The booth also provides a degree of privacy that makes the pay phone suitable for personal and business communications that would be appropriate in an open setting. The enclosed booth with a door that closes with was a technical requirement given the state of audio technology in 1900.
Renee:The cultural iconography of the booth solidifies around the mid 20th centuries in ways that go well beyond its functional role. The phone booth becomes a site in fiction and film where private communication happens in public spaces, where information is exchanged, where transformations occur. Superman changes in a phone booth. I still I can't do it in an airline bathroom, but he managed that. And he's wearing tights. I don't know how he did any of it. Spies make contact in phone booths. The booth is the locus of the of the crucial call, the dramatic conversation, the moment of decision. It's a narrative device as much as a piece of infrastructure, and it carries an emotional weight that the OpenPay phone console that eventually replaces the booth in most locations never quite manages to require. Do you remember that scene? I don't know which Superman it was, but he's standing in front of, like, one of those phone booths, and it doesn't have a door, and he's like.
Marc:What am I going to do? Yeah, exactly. It was one of those half booths.
Renee:Yeah. Yeah. Like, what do I do?
Marc:Yeah. And so, doesn't he go, and he spins around in the, like, the— Yeah.
Renee:Yeah.
Marc:I don't remember if that was the first one, the Christopher Reeves, the first one or the second one, but, yeah, I remember that. The transition from enclosed booth to open console happens in the 60s and 70s, driven primarily by maintenance costs and vandalism.
Renee:Well, think about this, though. How many college kids in the 1960s were trying to figure out how many kids they could fit in a phone booth? Right. Do you remember that stuff? They would be like, 22! Like, how did you fit 22 people in something that was meant to fit one person on a phone? Like, they used to do that stuff all the time, right? So I could see why this became a problem.
Marc:For sure. Well, at one time, we were in Edinburgh, I think. And, you know, Edinburgh could get kind of rowdy, you know, with the lads and the weekenders and stuff. And there was a bunch of college lads that they decided they were going to climb on top of one of these enclosed booths. Because in the UK, you still have a lot of enclosed booths. And they got on top of it, and they were like, I don't know what they were trying to do. But they literally climbed on top of the thing and were trying to do something. And it looked like it was going to tip. So, yeah.
Renee:Yeah. I see they go through a lot of abuse. And who wants to abuse that stupid open form one? Nobody. It's just dumb.
Marc:An enclosed booth is a controlled space that people can occupy for extended periods. Yeah, people. Yeah, I guess. Person, sure. People.
Renee:Yeah, okay.
Marc:And it turns out that people do occupy them for extended periods. Not always for telephone calls. Vandalism, impromptu shelter use, and various illicit activities in enclosed booths create maintenance burdens and liability concerns that the open console eliminates by removing the enclosure entirely. The acoustic quality suffers. The noise hoods on open consoles are far less effective from an enclosed booth than an enclosed booth, but the maintenance savings justify the trade-off. The iconic phone booth gives way to the utilitarian pole-mounted console, and something is lost that people don't fully acknowledge until much later.
Renee:The Tencent local call is worth thinking about as an economic and social fact because for most of the 20th century, a dime could connect you to anyone in your city. 10 cents, one dime. The coin that lived in everyone's pocket, the coin small enough to forget about until you needed it. The payphone democratized urban communication at a price point so low that it was accessible to virtually anyone who could reach one. A child who needed to call home. Well, that's not how we used to call home from a payphone, but I can see how you would. A worker without an office phone. Someone far from their neighborhood who needed to check in. A 10-cent call was infrastructure price as a public utility, not as a market rate service. And that pricing reflected a policy judgment about what communication access meant in a functioning urban society.
Marc:Yeah. So I don't remember it being a dime. That was, you know.
Renee:Oh, I do remember a dime. But then it went to a quarter, right? Yeah. And then that was like beyond the pale. And that's when we started doing stuff like calling home and like giving code names, like call collect. and then give him a code name my brother would do downtown and he would call and be like hey this is a click call from dawn town and like bill's downtown and you just hang up.
Marc:We talked about that in some other episode i don't remember what was that the phone freak episode oh
Renee:It might be yeah somebody used to make free calls yeah yeah the.
Marc:One i think where i was at pack bell it was like 20 cents which is like You know, okay, sure, two dimes, but, you know, I don't know, a quarter. At that point in time, when I was a kid, you were more likely to run a quarter. Right. And so a quarter became the default.
Renee:I remember a dime, though. I'm not that much older than you.
Marc:Yeah. I remember that. Well, you know, East Coast, you know, here when I was in the West Coast, Pac Bell, you know, owned those phones and, you know, gouging every cent. And they were criminals.
Renee:Yeah. All right. Fair enough. I went for Ma Bell. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Bell. We have Bill Atlantic, right? Or, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
Marc:Okay, go ahead. You know what? That would be, I mean, it's not specifically a tech episode, but like the history of tea, classic tea, you know, the Bells, the Bells, all that.
Renee:Well, I mean, it is, right? It's Lucent Technologies. It's Quest. I mean, it really is a lot. They, I mean, they had their own, the Bells had their own labs. I mean, that is a whole technology conversation to have. It really was a pretty amazing time to really, you know, disrupt.
Marc:I did some stuff for AT&T, and it was funny the way that they referenced the legacy of the business. And, you know, because the stock ticker is just the T, you know, for telephone, you know. Right. And so when you talk to them, it would be classic T, you know, versus just T. I see. And, you know, it's really interesting, you know, they would refer to it.
Renee:So they've given up on circuit switching and even recognizing it all. They're just like, we're data. Like, we're packet switching. We don't circuit switch a damn thing anymore. Like, yeah, fair enough.
Marc:The payphone's public accessibility is also, from a perspective of law enforcement and telephone company security, kind of a central problem. A call made from a payphone is difficult to trace because the call originates from a known public location rather than a subscriber account. This makes payphones attractive for communications that benefit from anonymity, illegal activity of various kinds, but also legitimate communications where privacy is a concern. The distinction between these uses is not visible to the network infrastructure. The payphone doesn't know why you're calling.
Renee:The drug trade's relationship with payphones is one of the most extensively documented aspects of paying, payphone social history, largely because law enforcement wrote a great deal about it. In urban drug markets in the 1980s and the early 1990s, payphones function as the primary communication infrastructure for street-level dealing operations. A dealer without a home phone and with an excellent reason not to use a traceable telephone uses a specific payphone as an office address. Customers know to call that number. The dealer monitors that phone. Transactions are arranged. The payphone is not incidental to this operation. It is the technology that makes it work at scale. Yeah, so the payphones were only owned by certain people. That's terrible.
Marc:Did you ever see that movie with Tom Cruise where he's the drug smuggler? He flies the planes and he was working for Pablo Escobar.
Renee:I know what you're talking about, but I've never seen it.
Marc:Yeah, yeah. The movie's pretty funny. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's sort of, you know, made up, but it was based on, you know, the real guy, Barry, whatever his name was. And he basically funnels tons of money into this little town in Arkansas. But I remember this one scene where there's literally a line of payphones on the wall of just an alley in this little town. And you're like, why are there so many payphones in a small town in Arkansas?
Renee:That's his office.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Renee:It's his call center.
Marc:Yeah. And he had like a bag of change and that's what he was doing was, you know, and he was just going phone to phone. Yeah. The response from telephone companies and municipalities is, you know, instructive as a case study and targeted infrastructure degradation. Pay phones in areas identified by police as drug market locations are subject to restriction programs. Incoming calls are blocked. Service hours are limited. And phones are physically removed. Have you ever seen the pictures when they remove them? They, like, literally just take the thing. There's, like, some dangling wires.
Renee:Yeah, there's cables hanging there. And there's, like, the paint. They didn't paint it. They painted around it. Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah. New York City removes thousands of payphones in the early 90s under an explicit program to disrupt street-level drug markets. The logic is that removing the communication infrastructure disrupts the market. Yes, sort of. The collateral fact is that all the other users of those payphones, residents, you know, without home phones, people in emergencies, workers, children, they lose their access to public communication infrastructure. The drug market adaptation, finding alternative communication methods, happens faster than the collateral damage is actually acknowledged.
Renee:Yeah, like you can't get a pager.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Renee:I always think, like, what did the mafia do then? Like, they were the ones who were using them. I would watch Goodfellas. Big Pauly never, ever, ever talked on anything other than a payphone. And the first time that what's-his-name, Henry Hill does it, they all get busted. So, you know, dummies.
Marc:Or they call the bar, you know, that's owned by the mob anyways.
Renee:Right, right.
Marc:And then they talk in code, you know, or whatever.
Renee:Yeah, the blue box is the other side of the payphone security history, and it represents a completely different kind of threat model. This is the one, we've talked about this before, actually. Yeah, we talked about this. Phone freaking. It was Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. You know them. Famously build and sell blue boxes as college entrepreneurial activity. It was their side hustle in the early 1970s. A blue box is a device that generates a specific audio tone that AT&T's long-distance switching network uses to route calls. So it allows the user to make free long-distance calls by manipulating the switching system directly. So, boop, oh, I have a long distance line. Okay. Well, it was a certain kind of boop that meant it didn't have to bill. Like, who? Okay. The vulnerability it exploits is that AT&T's network uses in-band signaling, which means the control tones travel on the same audio channel as the voice call, which means anyone who can generate the right tones can control the switching network.
Marc:Yeah, the Cap'n Crunch, the whistle.
Renee:There you go.
Marc:The phone-freaking community that develops around blue boxes and related techniques in the 60s and 70s is historically one of the direct ancestors of the hacker culture that produces personal computing and the early internet. The same curiosity about how systems work, the same interest in finding the gap between the system's intended behavior and its actual behavior, the same culture of sharing techniques and competing for status through technical achievement runs through both of them. Wozniak has said that without the Blue Box, there would have been no Apple computer, because building the Blue Box taught him that you could build sophisticated electronics cheaply and sell them to people who wanted capabilities the establishment wasn't providing. The payphone is where the personal computer industry, the industry's founding mythology, actually begins.
Renee:AT&T eventually moves to out-of-band signaling because why should they not make money? Separating the control channel from the voice channel, which eliminates the blue box vulnerability. The transition is expensive and it takes years, but the security improvement is complete. Once the control tones are on a separate channel the user can't access, the attack surface disappears. This is a pattern that recurs throughout telecommunication security history of vulnerabilities discovered, exploited extensively, eventually addressed through an architectural change that removes the vulnerability rather than trying to block specific exploits. The blue box era ends not because blue box users are caught and prosecuted, because I guess we didn't do that in the 70s. If only, if only that was still true, but because the network was redesigned around them. You know what? Maybe in the end, that was how it had to go. I mean, this was hardwired crap. I mean, like, what were you really going to do? I mean, circuit switching was hardwired. Like, even into your house, it was hardwired. So I could see why you would have to hardwire a solution for that. And you would just wait for a network upgrade, right?
Marc:I mean, yeah, it's definitely, it's a big deal. Well, and that's why some of the ways that they redid all of that, like the infrastructure, the last mile infrastructure, particularly in the States, last mile infrastructure in the States around phone works and exists the way it does because of that kind of decision to have circuit, dedicated circuits. So, like, there's, you know, architectural constraints. You know, that's one of the things that they had to live with.
Renee:We still live with it. Your data center's home run is to one, you know, central office. It's like nothing's really changed in that regard. I know once we get there, the way we switch telephone stuff, the way we switch now is software-based, like multiplexers, right?
Marc:Yeah, right.
Renee:And that was happening way back in the 90s. So like in that regard, I feel like, hmm, like it really like, yes, we went to packet switching and yes, that is like we just voiceover IP is a real thing. But I think the underlying infrastructure for the telco is still pretty much the same.
Marc:Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of it's it's similar, but, you know, they when you dig up a line, you don't you can't revisit the line every three, you know, three years.
Renee:Yeah. Yeah.
Marc:The economic foundation of the payphone network rests on a specific assumption that a significant fraction of the population needs to make telephone calls from locations away from their home or office and doesn't have a personal mobile device to do so. Through the 1980s, this assumption is unambiguously correct. Mobile phones exist, but they're expensive and large. Gordon Gekko. The subscriptions are out of reach for most consumers. The car phone is a luxury accessory. The brick phone that Gecko carries in Wall Street is a status symbol, not a mass market product. I love in the sequel when he gets back out of jail and they hand him the phone. It's great. The payphone network serves a large and economically diverse population.
Renee:The price of mobile handsets falls through the late 1980s and 1990s at a rate that mirrors the trajectory of computing hardware, roughly halving every few years of manufacturing scales and component costs drop. The subscriber base grows correspondingly. By the mid-1990s, mobile phones are mass-market consumer products rather than executive accessories, and the payphone industry is watching its addressable market shrink. The crossover point where mobile phone penetration becomes high enough that the majority of people who would use a payphone have an alternate arrives around$2,000, and the revenue decline that follows is steep and completely irreversible. Yeah, I don't see anybody flushing their cell phone to run to a payphone.
Marc:No, no, not usually, yeah. The payphone's industry revenue per unit falls through the 90s for reasons beyond simple mobile competition. The flat rate mobile calling plan. Early mobile plans charged per minute, which meant that a payphone at a dime per call was still economically competitive for short local calls. The shift to unlimited calling plans, which rolls out through the late 90s and early 2000s, eliminates the per call cost comparison entirely. Once your mobile plan includes unlimited calls, the marginal cost of any additional call from your mobile phone is zero. The payphone charges a quarter, then 50 cents, then a dollar as operators try to maintain revenue on declining volume. And the economics just become, you know, untenable.
Renee:We used to pay for texting. Do you remember that? We used to pay for, like, we used to have to pay for everything. And then eventually it was like, your minutes are free after 6 p.m. And then that went away. And it was like, you know, your flat build for your minutes. And then it was like, oh, and then everybody was like, come join us. We'll give you free texting. And then there were these savants that could text you whole paragraphs from like, Like, from that, from that keypad.
Marc:Yeah, the T9, yeah.
Renee:Yeah, like, I still don't, that's crazy. I was never good at that. You would get all kinds of crazy stuff from me, because I couldn't, I couldn't do it. The Blackberry saved me in the long run.
Marc:The, my favorite, not my favorite, but one of, one of my favorite gangster movies is The Departed. I actually like the, the Asian version better than The Departed, but, you know, anyways. And and dicaprio has to reach into his pocket at one point and he's and he's trying to text and he's got just a you know a whatever you know the keypad not an actual keyboard and you know and i'm thinking and he's not looking at the stupid phone he's literally you know texting blind i'm thinking whatever good luck man that's you know there
Renee:Were people that good they have competitions like yeah there were people that i don't understand it like they were really good at it. I don't get it. Anyway, the Telecommunications Acts of 1996 deregulates payphone service in a way that accelerates the decline. Before deregulation, payphones are regulated as a utility service with obligations to serve and pricing controls that reflect their public infrastructure role. This is why people don't want their applications or their services to become like part of the public infrastructure, because as soon as you do, welcome to the Public Utility Commission, where we now run your life, right? After deregulation, payphone operators are free to price calls at market rate, remove phones from locations where revenue doesn't cover costs. The predictable result is a concentration of payphones in high-traffic, high-revenue locations and removal from low-traffic, low-revenue locations. The locations with lowest payphone revenue are often the locations with the highest need. Low-income urban neighborhoods, rural areas, where sometimes the one attached to the general store was the one everybody used, right? Right. You know, communities with low mobile phone penetration, these were all the people that were using the pay phones and they were about to lose them.
Marc:Well, okay. So think about that last bit, right? Their low mobile phone penetration. That used to be a thing. Like, it's still a thing. It's still a thing in some places.
Renee:But, yeah. But the Amish. Like, I need an Amish kid. And the first thing they say to me is, can I see your phone? Like, yeah, like you on Facebook. Yeah, can I see that too? Uh-huh. Like, I travel, so for a while, I was traveling by Amtrak, like, a lot, a lot.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Renee:And you meet a lot of Amish people on the Amtrak train. Yeah, on the train. And I try to eat with them as much as I can, because I just, I think they're the most lovely people, and I just, they're it. But I was sitting at a table with a bunch of, like, teenagers, and they're like, and I'm telling them the story about how Magnum P.I. Stole all the water from the city of Fresno. And I realized I had to give them all the context. Okay, so Magnum P.I., he's an actor who was in this show in the early 80s, and women loved him. He could do no wrong. He sells reverse mortgages now. Don't even ask. And then I go through the whole thing, right? And I get to the end, and I'm like, and then he stole all the water from Fresno. And they're like, oh! And I'm like, yeah, good for you, because I had to explain all of it. But I swear to you, the first thing they say is, you got a new iPhone. I do. Can I see it? Yeah. Because it's so, like, taboo for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are, yes, of course, there are people who don't have phones.
Marc:I wish I was one of them. Yeah, I mean, that's a thing. Like, if you don't have a place that has, you know, cell reception, like even at my house today, I live kind of out in the sticks and mobile phone penetration is not great. I'm not going to go and mount a pay phone, you know, off the side of my, right? That's what I got, you know, broadband for. But, like, that was a thing, right? You're talking about post-1996 and deregulation. The geographic distribution of payphone removal is documented in research that finds a consistent pattern. Payphones are removed disproportionately from low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in precisely the locations where residents are most likely to lack a mobile phone service and most dependent on public communication infrastructure. The deregulation framework treats payphones as a private business rather than a public utility, and private businesses make rational location decisions based on revenue, which produces an outcome that systematically disadvantages the communities already most underserved by telecommunication infrastructure. The market failure is predictable from the framework, and in this case, the framework was chosen anyway.
Renee:So in August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina makes landfall. The cellular network in the Gulf Coast region, which already had been degrading in reliability over the previous decade as the paid phone network contracted and carriers positioned mobile as the replacement for public communication, it all failed. Cell towers were destroyed or damaged. Backup generators ran out of fuel. Network congestion from simultaneous call attempts overwhelmed the remaining capacity. That happens here during Coachella, by the way. Like you cannot get a phone call out because every ridiculous like influencer is trying to send stuff through the network, photos of themselves. For the people trapped in New Orleans and the surrounding region, the failure of the cellular network is not an inconvenience. It's a life safety crisis. People cannot reach emergency services. Family members cannot locate each other. Evacuation coordination fails in part because communication fails.
Marc:Yeah, I remember this a lot. You know, I was still living in the States at the time, but I remember the, you know, that one of the relocation or the kind of relief centers was the big stadium. And, you know, so you get that many people there and no calls can happen because it's totally jammed. There's only so many calls a cell, you know, a cell tower can handle. The payphones that remain operational during Katrina are the ones connected to hardwired landline infrastructure rather than cellular backhaul. Because copper landline infrastructure has a different failure mode than cellular infrastructure and is more likely to survive storm damage than, you know, the destroyed towers do. The FCC post-Katrina reports document that functioning payphones became critical communication nodes with lines of people waiting to use them. The reports also document that payphone availability in the affected areas has declined significantly in the preceding years, and that the areas with the lowest payphone availability in the areas with the poorest pre-existing cellular coverage, meaning some of the communities have lost both the old infrastructure and have inadequate new infrastructure to replace it.
Renee:I'm just sitting here thinking, like, in an earthquake, that's probably all of us, right? And if there's no plan B, and I can't tell, I haven't seen a payphone anywhere in my town. I haven't seen, I'm going to start looking for them now. Like, I haven't seen one. I don't, that's crazy. Yeah, I'm a little worried now. The after-action analysis of Katrina produces a set of recommendations about communications infrastructure resilience that include attention to the payphone network, But economic dynamics that drove the decline don't change. The FCC has universal service obligations that theoretically require telecommunication hand carriers to maintain service in underserved areas. And there are programs that subsidize telephone service for low-income customers. But the payphone specifically as a form of public access infrastructure rather than a subscription service falls into a regulatory gap. No one is clearly responsible for ensuring that public communication access. Exists in a physical location when the market has determined it is not profitable to provide it. So the hell with you and your earthquake. We don't make money, so good luck.
Marc:I mean, it's kind of messed up, right? You'd think communication of some form or another is a basic service.
Renee:In the public sphere, you have a heart attack on the street. I can't find the nearest payphone and call 911, right? Like, I can't do that.
Marc:I don't know. It's a tough one there. The New York City Link NYC program launched in 2016 represents one approach to the successor infrastructure question. The program replaces decommissioned payphone kiosks with communications kiosks that provide free Wi-Fi, free domestic phone calls via digital interface, device charging, and a tablet interface for city services. The kiosks are funded through advertising revenue, primarily digital advertising displayed on the kiosk screens. By 2020, New York has installed over 1,800 link NYC kiosks, making it the largest free public Wi-Fi network in the world. Free public Wi-Fi. The security alerts are going off in my head.
Renee:Let's go hack it.
Marc:The program demonstrates that public communication infrastructure can be financially self-sustaining in high-traffic urban locations through advertising subsidy.
Renee:The LinkNYC model has obvious limitation that its architects acknowledge. It works in New York because New York has sufficient foot traffic and advertising value to make the advertising subsidy model work. It doesn't obviously transfer to lower-density urban areas, like you wouldn't put it here, rural areas or the specific locations outside hospitals and low-income neighborhoods, at rural crossroads where public communication access has historically been most important, and advertising revenue is the least valuable. I mean, like you're standing at the crossroads of two dirt roads and there's a phone. Like, are you really going to run ads there?
Marc:Well, a tablet with, yeah.
Renee:Yeah, come to Pete's. Like, it's 22 miles away. Look for it on the left. Like, come on. The program solves the problem for locations that are already reasonably well served and provides a partial answer for the locations that need it the most.
Marc:Yeah. The legal obligation to maintain payphones persists in a diminished form in some jurisdictions. Several states and the FCC maintain requirements that carriers provide payphone service in certain locations, particularly in areas without adequate mobile coverage. The practical enforcement of these requirements is inconsistent, though, and the definition of adequate mobile coverage is, you know, contested. Carriers have a strong financial interest in declaring mobile coverage adequate because adequate mobile coverage is the regulatory trigger that allows payphone removal. The standard for what counts as adequate is partly a technical question about signal strength and coverage area and partly a policy question about what level of access the public is entitled to actually expect.
Renee:I just want to reflect on that for just one second to talk about how much policy drives all this stuff that we either get or don't get. Like we talked about electric cars. We've talked about, you know, all these like things that end up in our emerging technology world today, like they were literally like beat up, you know, I wouldn't even say guided. I would say like directed, you know, by public policy. So like when you vote to throw ai into the world with no regulation around it so you can beat your competitor like that that's what you're setting us up for 20 years from now okay so anyway the payphone story is underneath the nostalgia for phone booths and the cultural imagery of superman and the blue boxes and the street corner drug markets and the mob it's a story about and.
Marc:The red london
Renee:Booths and the red london boots and even the blue one i guess the story about imagery about how we decide what counts as infrastructure and who gets to make that decision. A fire hydrant is infrastructure. Nobody asks whether a fire hydrant maintenance is profitable on a block-by-block basis because we've decided as a society that fire suppression capability is a public good, that we should be uniformly available regardless of the revenue implications. Except for when Magnum P.I. is involved. Because you know what? But that's how he was stealing all that money from the city of Fresno. We never made the decision about public communication access. We let it be a market service. And when the market stopped finding it profitable, it went away. And the people who depended on it most were the people least able to replace it with the alternative the market was providing.
Marc:The cellular network that replaced the payphone is privately owned infrastructure operated for profit by a small number of carriers. And they just keep getting smaller. The number is just consolidation. Its coverage and reliability reflect, you know, well, yeah, I won't go off on the test.
Renee:Here's what I think about that. Here's what I think about that. Like that constant compression of a market, like eventually it's like the Big Bang, right? Like it's like a black hole that's going to suck in all the competitors. It gets down to like this super dense thing and then it just explodes again and that's deregulation or that's all the market forces saying you're not allowed to be a monopoly anymore. And then it, bam, it becomes a hundred different things again. And now the market's wide open and we get, I mean, T-Mobile is why there was monthly, you know, billing that was predictable in mobile phones. It was because like that, that was broken up and said, you're not competitive enough. Like you, you, you got to introduce more people into the market. So, you know, it'll eventually, eventually we'll have more than one TV channel. I promise eventually we'll be that way.
Marc:I guess probably different countries are different, but particularly in the States, you know, and I see it here in the UK as well, like. If privatize, that'll solve the industry problems. Then there's predictable outcomes that happen when privatization happens. And I see it today with water in the UK. Water is atrocious the way it's handled in the UK.
Renee:You guys privatized weird stuff, though. You privatized the mail. You guys privatized a lot of stuff that's still here is still run by the government.
Marc:Yeah. And the mail is a good example because I see these different people that say, well, the mail is losing money or whatever. And it's like, no, the mail is a service provided by the government. Therefore, it costs a certain amount. Right. You know, nobody says that, you know, the military is losing money, you know, therefore.
Renee:NASA's losing money. Like, no kidding. That's what we pay them to do.
Marc:No kidding.
Renee:We pay them to lose money.
Marc:Exactly. That's a service. That's what it's supposed to do. It has an outcome that it's trying to achieve. The outcome is not revenue-driven. So you think about which services should the outcomes are benefit to society versus revenue, then that's where you draw the line. But thinking about phones and stuff, it's like, well, communication's You know, should that be a public good or should that be a private, you know, revenue driver? Well, yeah. I mean, you know, debate, right?
Renee:Well, why can't you run it like they run stuff in the Department of Defense, right? Like, look how long the Air Force was using floppy disks. It got to the point where there was only one floppy disk supplier left in the United States. And the Air Force decided rather than just paying them, they were going to buy them. So that they could still use those things for 10 more years because updating all of the stuff in the silos, like, they couldn't do it right away. There wasn't enough money. And so, like, yeah, so, like, why, like, if you need it, if you need it that bad, right, like, the government just goes out and buys it, right? Well, if we needed it that bad, they could have went out and said, we're going to take over the payphone network.
Marc:Yes. Right? There's definitely, you know, different ways to look at it from the political spectrum, right? But, you know, I think communication is a basic need.
Renee:It should count. Yeah, it should count.
Marc:So it's a hard one to say that, you know, you don't get to communicate because you don't have money, you know?
Renee:Right, yeah.
Marc:Yeah. So let's go back to pay funds here, right? There's a limited number of carriers around mobile and even pay phone or landline technology. But the coverage and reliability reflect investment decisions made on the basis of subscriber revenue potential, which means that coverage is systematically better in areas where higher incomes and higher population density and systematically worse in areas where the return on infrastructure investment is lower. The payphone network has or had the same basic dynamic after deregulation. The landline network before deregulation had universal service obligations that partially counteracted that dynamic. The question of whether a public communication network should have universal service obligations and who pays for the obligation in locations where it's economically irrational is the same question we didn't fully answer about payphones, transposed onto a new technology, mobile.
Renee:Yeah. I think about the payphone as a piece of furniture in the city, like a bench or a water fountain or a trash can, something that assumed you were a person moving through an urban space with needs that the city should accommodate. The bench assumes you might need to sit. The water fountain assumes you might need to drink. Out of that water fountain, though? I see. Okay, okay, okay. The payphone assumes you might need to call. Removing the payphone from the furniture of the city is a statement, even if it wasn't intended as one, about whether the city expects you to have already solved your communication needs before you leave the house. The people who had solved them didn't notice the payphone going away. The people who hadn't were left standing on an empty corner, unable to make a doctor's appointment. That's terrible.
Marc:That is terrible. In 2022, New York City removes the last standalone payphone. I know.
Renee:I would have gone there to watch that.
Marc:Yeah. There's still lots of payphones in London. And I saw like a real functioning one, not just these, because they have set up these kind of these more tablet-y kind of ones like they've got in New York. But this is a real, it looked like a real phone. I was surprised. But yeah, that was the last one in 2022. And the final one, not replaced by a Link NYC kiosk from a corner in Midtown Manhattan. So it's a ceremonial removal with press coverage framed as the end of an era. And the framing, yeah, okay, it's accurate and slightly misleading. At the same time, the era of the payphone as mass market infrastructure ended literally 20 years before that. And what ended in 2022 was the last physical remnant of a network that had already been gone literally for a generation. The era it's actually the end of is, you know, it's harder to name. The era when you could assume that a stranger in a city had access to a telephone. All right. So if you ever needed to make a call from a payphone in an emergency and found one that worked, you experienced the payphone network performing exactly the function it was designed to perform. And you probably remember it.
Renee:If you have a specific memory of a phone booth, the smell of it, the way to the door, I could never figure, I could never get, I have problems with airplane doors too. The particular acoustics of being enclosed in a glass box at a loud train station, that memory is preserving something the built environment no longer contains, and it's worth keeping.
Marc:Yeah. And if you were a phone freak and you built a blue box and you could be like, and you would like to be on the podcast to talk about it, let us know. We're generally interested. And the statute of limitations has definitely run out.
Renee:Yeah, no one can arrest you for that now. I love it. I would love it. This is Nostalgic Nerds, where the infrastructure that used to be on every corner turns out to have carried more than phone calls. Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe, follow, hit the subscribe button. Share this with someone who still knows what a dial tone sounds like and why it mattered that you could always find one. We'll be back next week. Thanks.
Marc:Thank you.
