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Requiem For The Pay Phone
from the no-more-pay-phone dept
Like most people who own a mobile phone I can't remember the last time I used a pay phone. Now the Washington Post has an article looking at the slow death of the pay phone. Most pay phones are owned by large phone companies that are making up the losses through mobile phone service and other telecom services. However, the independent operators of mobile phones are uninstalling them as fast as they possibly can. It seems the remaining phones now cost a lot more than they bring in and are driving these firms towards bankruptcy. They say that low income areas are still generating cash, as people there can't afford mobile phones for themselves yet. Meanwhile, the independent operators of pay phones are moving into offering internet access, internet kiosks, and ATM machines. Of course, if the independent pay phone operators worked the way Hollywood works, they'd be demanding that Congress outlaw mobile phones, since they're clearly depriving them of revenue. It's nice to see at least one business trying to adapt to changing markets rather than crying to the government.
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Not quite right think.
So the government has already been there, and wacked 'em. Why would the governemtn help 'em now?
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Interesting idea, but the implementation was rather shoddy. For one, the use of ruggedised payphone keypad buttons for the keyboard made the thing impossible to type on except for very slowly. Also, the browser software didn't understand either SSL or HTTP authentication, making it useless for things like checking mail over a secure connection, blog posting, &c.
If they ironed these bugs out, they could be quite useful.
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What about disposable cell phones
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Re: What about disposable cell phones
They did recently receive approval from the FCC for their phones, but I still have my doubts about how strong the company actually is.
The second company that was working on such phones, Telespree, has completely changed their business model, and now are working on systems to make it easier for mobile carriers to turn on a new mobile phone instead. It seems they realized the market for disposable mobile phones was a weak one, and there was a bigger, more profitable market selling the backend software they wrote instead.
The third company is called Diceland, and they're working on a disposable mobile phone printed on paper. I think they're still a ways off on their technology.
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Re: What about disposable cell phones
Along those lines, I was once invited to an interview with a company in downtown San Jose, abba.com or something, that was very secretive about what they do. When I got there, they told me they planned to sell email addresses with the person's phone number within the address. It sounded really stupid, and I said so, and the guy was like "oh, you picked up on that." And they gave some weird talk about how it's their software but it's not really their software, but I'm going to write software on some stand-alone desktop and it's not going to be used. Seems to have been a scam that never got off the ground.
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Failure?
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