NOT HANGING UP YET
Pay phones still important, needed
A pay phone sits forlorn and forgotten on the corner of Victoria Avenue and Winnipeg Street in Regina, its blue SaskTel logo dirty and faded.
A man and woman stroll past and stop. The woman lifts the receiver, puts in two quarters and promptly puts the receiver down again.
When asked, the man laughs and said they had just wanted to see if it still worked.
“I haven’t used a pay phone in 25 years,” he said, cellphone in hand.
Pay phone use continues to gradually decline across the nation as cellphones rise to claim the prize of most convenient method of communication.
A Leader-Post reporter staked out a couple of pay phones recently in search of a user — only to watch many people simply stride past.
A mother paused for a minute to let her young daughter play with the pay phone before resuming their walk to a nearby store. A man stood beside the pay phone texting. Three teenagers walked past, each with cellphone in hand.
No one stopped to actually use the pay phone, which charges customers 50 cents a call.
Ten years ago, SaskTel, the main provider of pay phones in Saskatchewan, had 4,500 pay phones across the province. Now it has 1,350, Greg Jacobs, external communications manager with SaskTel, said in a recent interview.
Pay phone counts in cities across the province reflect this decade of decrease. Regina dropped from an estimated 800 to today’s 240. Saskatoon went from an estimated 700 to just 210.
Pay phone revenue has taken a parallel plunge. In 2008, SaskTel’s pay phones brought in between $4 million and $5 million dollars. This year, they’re expected to rake in a meagre $400,000.
So, are we nearing the end of the pay phone?
Not likely, said Jacobs. “Although we’ll see a reduction in them, I don’t anticipate we’ll see them disappear completely anytime soon,” he said. “They still serve a purpose for a number of customers, and we still do generate revenue from pay phones. When we start running into pay phones where we’re not generating any revenue, that’s when you would see interest in removing some of them.”
He said pay phones still provide a valuable service to those who can’t afford a cellphone or choose not to buy one.
Bonnie Morton, minister and advocate at the Regina AntiPoverty Ministry, seconded that sentiment. She said people on the streets often rely on pay phones, and lower-income families who can’t afford a cellphone use them in case of an emergency. Removing pay phones completely would cause safety issues, she said.
“Not everybody has a cellphone,” she said. “We’ve got caught up these days in all of this technology and think everybody has it — and everybody doesn’t have it.”
Morton has had people call her from a pay phone in an emergency.
“I had one person who ... had a diabetic episode and needed to get to the hospital, so we just picked them up and took them. So at least having a pay phone made it possible for them to contact somebody,” she said.
In 2016, total pay phone revenue across the country was a mere oneone-thousandth of the cellphone’s mind-boggling $24-billion revenue, at $22.2 million. This is down from $64 million in 2012.
There were 57,542 pay phones in Canada in 2016, down from 93,771 just four years earlier.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which regulates all things broadcasting and telecommunications, recognizes the importance of pay phones to communities. In its 2004 Telecom Decision, CRTC decided that “although demand for pay phone service was declining, it was still an important public service.”
In 2013, a moratorium was put in place, which requires pay phone providers to give the community 60 days notice in a variety of forms before removing the last pay phone from the community.
Jacobs said SaskTel recognizes the importance of having a pay phone in a community.
“Although it’s not considered the most modern communications avenue, it is still important for a number of people, and that’s part of the reason why we continue to maintain as many as we do.”
Although it’s not considered the most modern communications avenue, it is still important for a number of people ...