How many telephone booths would you say there are now in Italy? If your answer were “Few, and in any case no one uses them anymore”, you would be very far from the truth.
In Italy there are a little less than 18 thousand active telephone booths, two thousand only between Rome and Milan: and they are only a part of the so-called “public telephone stations”, which also include pay phones in prisons, airports, stations and in restaurants or mountain huts. In Italy the public telephone systems still active are about 40 thousand. A little over 18 million calls were made from these phones in 2017 (for a total of 20 million minutes, equivalent to 38 years of phone calls).
If you would have answered «Few, and in any case no one uses them anymore» it is because telephone boxes are perceived as something outdated, belonging to a finite era. That's largely true, and many readers of this article have never had a token or even just a calling card in their hands, but phone booths still hold out, however hard it may be. Among those who continue to use them there are also those who do it for emergency calls, which from the telephone booths are always free.
In 2019 there will be talk of telephone booths because the new European Code for electronic communications was approved a couple of months ago. Among electronic communications there are also those made on the street with a receiver in hand and, as always, Italy will have to “incorporate that text into its own legal system”. In a nutshell, the European Union says in the Code that states can stop considering public telephones a “universal service”, that is, that each state must commit to offering its citizens. TIM, the company that manages all public telephones in Italy, is still obliged to guarantee a certain number of functioning telephone boxes. In the next few months it could start to dismantle them, but to do so it will need permits that depend on the opinion of AGCOM, the Authority for Communications Guarantees.
Although many do not think about it, telephone boxes are therefore objects of the present, not anachronistic totems. Before talking about their present and trying to understand what their future could be, let's go back to when they were born and the road they took to get to 2019.
The first telephone booths arrived in the 1880s, a few years after the invention of essential tools for their existence: telephones. The general consensus among the few enthusiasts of the subject is that the first public pay phone was invented in 1889 in Connecticut by William Gray, an annoyed inventor: one day his wife needed a doctor, he didn't know what to call him and many of them who already had a phone refused to help him. The big work had been done by Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell; Gray, in his small way, invented a mechanism that allowed you to collect coins and which, in exchange for coins, allowed you to talk to someone on the other side of the line.
At the turn of the century public telephones arrived in Europe and the most famous in the world, the red ones in London, have existed since 1924. The first two public telephone boxes in Italy were installed on 10 February 1952 in Milan: in Piazza San Babila and in Piazza 24th May. They were made of metal and glass, with some advertising stickers on them, and to dial the number to call there was a dial. Stipel installed them, a Turin-based company that in the 1960s would be incorporated by SIP, which would later become Telecom in the 1990s. Before telephone booths, public telephones were only found in bars and taverns: people entered, asked to be able to use them, called and paid. But, as the journalist who reported the news in Corriere della Sera wrote, “ladies and foreigners considered it impractical to go to premises equipped with telephone sets”.
The reporter spoke of “public payphone booths, according to the system for some time in use abroad” and explained that they were the first “of a series of two hundred”, all to be installed in Milan. Finally, he pointed out that the cabins were “very decent”, he hoped that “the education of citizens would know how to preserve them” and complained about one thing only:
«Abroad, these telephone booths have the advantage of being equipped with devices that can be operated with coins in circulation. This is not yet possible with us, because there are very few acmonital coins in circulation and moreover they do not have sufficient weight “.
Those booths operated with tokens “which can be purchased at newspaper outlets located near the booths, in anticipation of calling at any hour of the day or night.” The tokens were discs, often in bronze or copper, with grooves. In the 1950s, a token was worth thirty lire; in the eighties one hundred lire, in the nineties two hundred lire. They stopped being accepted in 2001, with the arrival of the euro, but already in the second half of the seventies they were put in crisis by the telephone cards, introduced because the tokens were a useless burden and because by stealing them they could be reused without anyone if noticed it.
The first cards were blue and white, with 'calling card' written on them. At the beginning they also made cards of 1.000 or 2.o00 lire, but the denominations that were most successful were the five thousand and ten thousand lire.
In the mid-nineties, when SIP became Telecom, the cards also changed, as anyone who started collecting them knows well. Since then they have been called “phone cards” and continue to be printed even now, in 2019.
Meanwhile, the cabins were also changing. The U + I, those of the seventies, gray and rectangular, were in some cases replaced with the G + M, a little less gray and a little less rectangular. Which in turn were replaced by the Rotor, the cabins that many think of when they think of a booth: the red ones with a black handset. The Rotors arrived in 1987 and disappeared more or less together with the lire.
The most recent phones – gray and round, with a red handset – are the Digito, from which it was possible to send SMS, fax and email. TIM says that “the current phones on the road are all Digito”.
There is no need to make it too long, on what happened from 2000 onwards. Things for pay phones began to change with the arrival of cell phones and smartphones, which gave a whole new meaning to the slogan “You are never alone when near a phone” used by SIP in the 1970s.
In 2001, when the first Nokia 3310s began to be seen around, public telephones in Italy continued to be considered a universal service. There were, TIM explains, 145 thousand booths, from which at least 700 million minutes of calls were sent a year (35 times more than those made in 2017). To the point that AGCOM – the independent administrative communications authority – intervened to ensure that TIM complied with certain “qualitative and quantitative” criteria for the installation of new public telephones and maintenance of the old ones. It was decided that a certain number of cabins accessible to disabled people were needed and, simplifying a bit, at least one cabin per thousand inhabitants in small municipalities and three cabins per thousand inhabitants in large municipalities.
In 2009, when the first iPhone 3Gs began to be seen around, Telecom however asked AGCOM to review the rules decided in 2001. AGCOM agreed, under certain conditions: it was decided, in a nutshell, that Telecom could start a procedure decommissioning of the substations, even without having to comply with the quantitative criteria of 2009.
Today, if TIM wants to remove a booth, it must follow a specific procedure. He has to put a notice on that booth, saying he intends to remove it. From that moment on, anyone has 30 days to send an email in which they say they are against the removal, justifying their opposition. AGCOM then analyzes the “instances of opposition to removal”. In 2015 TIM decided to remove 10 thousand cabins. 505 opposition petitions were presented and AGCOM accepted 83 percent. On the reasons used by the people who oppose the removal, TIM explains that “they range from simple reasons of affection to the cabin, which has become an” icon “in the reference reality, to the garrison in squares or streets that are considered locally great social importance “.
From 2010 to 2017, the number of calls made from public telephones fell by 80 percent, from 96 million to less than 20. In 2010, 128 million minutes of calls were made, in 2017 less than 20. However, it is not the average duration of calls varied greatly: just over a minute, compared to almost three minutes on average for a call from a landline. It means that public telephones continue to be used for fast, information and necessity calls. They are not generally used to gossip or tell each other about holidays.
As AGCOM points out, while normal calls have dropped by 80 percent in seven years, those made to emergency numbers – which are free from telephone boxes – have dropped by only 65 percent. And emergency calls were 2.3 per cent of total calls in 2017: almost double compared to 2010, when public telephones were double. We are therefore talking about almost 500 thousand emergency calls in just one year. Removing all the road cabins, and more generally all public telephones, would therefore mean removing the possibility of making those calls, which are presumed to be important.
This is not a question to be taken lightly, but it is still true that it does not take long to predict that every year that passes the cabins will be less and less used.
It is time to go back to the European Code for Electronic Communications. Based on the Code, and on the rules that Italy will decide to adopt as a result (it will have time until 2020), it will be necessary to decide whether public telephones are a “redundant” service, and therefore superfluous, or whether they continue to be necessary: at least in some cases, at least for someone. TIM announces that “it intends to continue with the requalification of the service, in line with the new communication needs of the population” and that “in this logic, the stations currently present are decommissioned if not used”. AGCOM instead launched a public consultation a few days ago to ask interested bodies for opinions on the matter. The results will be published during the summer of 2019.
In a nutshell, AGCOM will have to decide new times and new ways in which TIM will be able to remove the booths, and could also decide on a minimum number of booths that TIM will have to leave and continue to operate. But for at least a few years, at least a few thousand cabins will continue to be among us.
Meanwhile, in Italy and abroad, people are thinking about what to put in certain booths instead of telephones. For now, the most popular options are books (we are talking about libraries, where you can leave and take books) and defibrillators (to have them in places that are known and accessible to everyone if they ever need to be used). In Florence, on the other hand, in 2017 TIM installed four cabins called “TIM City Link” and described as “multimedia totems”. But it doesn't seem like an idea destined to be very successful.
AGCOM also suggests that “public telephony stations, even if originally designed to offer a service that the state would not justify their maintenance, could still play a strategic role if used as infrastructural support for the offer of broadband services and ultra-wide “. They would therefore become mega-routers for wifi.
Finally, some other curiosities about the telephone booths that resist: the old ones, without books or wifi routers.
– There is a map showing all operational booths near a certain address. The average distance between two Italian telephone boxes is 650 meters. If the President of the Republic were to need it, he would find one in via Nazionale 183, a five-minute walk from the Quirinale.
– Each shot now costs 10 euro cents and in the case of national calls to a fixed number, one shot lasts 43 seconds on weekdays and 290 on holidays, as well as one or two calls on answer. For cabin-to-cell phone calls, the shutter takes 11.80 seconds. The ch The most expensive calls are those to zone 7 countries, such as the British Virgin Islands or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The connection fee is 50 cents and each subsequent click lasts just two seconds. But there are special cards that with five euros allow you to talk for 19 minutes with a person in Alaska, or for 9 minutes with one in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
– The number to ask for information on the booths or report faults is 800-134-134. Francesco, one of about 20 operators who answer these calls, says that many calls are made to “report improper use of the cabin.” He also explains that the phone booth SMS service will likely be abolished, because it is sometimes used to send threatening messages whose sender cannot be identified.
– In addition to calling, telephone boxes can also be called, among other things. Just go to a booth, follow the instructions for the service “Will you call me?” and find the number of that booth. Then you tell those responsible to call the toll number 199-229-229 and then enter the number of the cabin to call. But don't use it to threaten Colin Farrell.
