PUAF: The Future Of Pay Phones

Roger Darlington’s CommsWatch weblog has an interesting post about a research conducted by the Public Utilities Access Forum into the number of operational pay phones in the UK.

According to the PUAF’s paper, over the last two years, BT has removed 17,500 payphones and of the remaining 75,000 claims that 27,000 are unprofitable. These figures mirror the rise of mobiles, with revenues from call boxes having dropped 41% since 2000, a trend set to continue.

There are obvious universal service requirement factors in play here, as non-mobile owning citizen-consumers find it increasingly difficult to find a phone (and from my experience even when you do it doesn’t actually work). With this in mind, I suspect Roger will be flagging the PUAF’s reserach to Ofcom’s Consumer Panel, of which he is a member.

Of course, we can not ignore the fact that technological progess has, and will continue to undermine the economic (and to some degree the public) value of installing and maintaining a network of pay phones - a network for which we all pay indirectly. But how much do we want to pay to maintain this resource when given a choice people prefer to use a mobile? In particular, the introduction and uptake of pay as you go mobiles (across all socio-economic groups) has further undermined the business model behind payphones, despite pay as you go being ecomically irrational in relation to the cost of making a call from a phone box.