Australia's primary operator of payphones made them all free a couple of years ago. More as a way to keep them as advertising space than any particular good-will gesture.
In Shanghai there are some phone-booth-looking objects you can find on the sidewalk that advertise free wifi. I've never investigated how to use the free wifi, but presumably someone might.
You need to be mobile subscriber to that network or else pay per use e.g if booth is China Telecom then if you have CT mobile service the "hotspot" is bundled. If you are say a CMCC user then you can pay to use after registering.
It's modelled on the same way that HongKong pay phone booths from PCCW were setup a long time ago.
That's actually better than I expected, considering how the airport wifi in Pudong was impossible to use for non-Chinese. (There was a verification procedure involving something external...) I think that's changed now?
Still, if you're already subscribed to the mobile service, wifi on the sidewalk isn't worth much.
I’ve seen some in Moscow, too, and I think actually every Rostelecom payphone is free now (something about the universal communication services project I guess). In Russian: https://www.company.rt.ru/projects/uus/
Sad really, because I liked holding the flag button down before picking up the receiver, which displays OUT OF SERVICE until the receiver is lifted again.
I would find a bank of 3 busy payphones on a weekend, get 2 of them to display the message, and sit there with my mates laughing at the long line of payphone users.
Last I tried, this no longer worked on the free Telstra payphones. End of a mildly amusing prank era.
It's not about funny. I have observed it in dogs and young children. It's about taking action in the world and receiving (any) feedback that your actions have an impact. That's the origin of pranks, negging, playing. It's quite an important development step, imho.
Its a lesson in human behaviour. And like all young people we were interested in what makes society tick. We were daring rogue anthropologists.
You get the 3 payphones.
If you have them all present the message, someone gets curious and lifts a handset, resolving the issue.
But if you disable only 2, everyone just lines up behind the working payphone. Its a repeatable experiment, one we performed everywhere we saw telstra payphones.
Apologies if you happen to be a disgruntled telstra payphone user.
They were only psychologically limited. Thats the point. All someone has to do is pick up the handset and the condition clears. Instead they line up, flocking with other humans. A human being curious enough to lift a second handset immediately resolves the issue. The experiment just demonstrates how rare that condition is. And judging by your responses I feel like you would not have been curious enough to either lift a handset or identify the method to create the condition in the first place.
I don't know why you are getting dogged on for this. Yeah, it was probably annoying in a variety of ways to those people, but it demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate us when we are in an agitated state. This is the number one weapon of modern scammers.
As an aside-but-related experiment, I worked in a bookstore in an American mall when I was young. It was always rather quiet in our store compared to the rest of the mall, so when someone purchased something, our cash register noise could be heard through the whole bookstore. After awhile, I realized every time someone made a purchase, I'd end up with a line formed almost immediately behind them. It seemed like the cash register noise triggered some Pavlovian response to the customers still browsing in the store, as though they needed to hurry up and get it line before it got too long.
So, I tried an experiment. When nobody was in line and we had customers milling about, I'd run a mid-day report from my register which sounded similar to someone making a purchase. Lo and behold, people lined up, almost absent-mindedly. Every customer did not come when called by the register, but most did. I'd be hard-pressed to repeat the experiment today with the tap payments and touchscreens, though.
Same mall, a few years later, we also realized that if we stood outside a store or kiosk in very specific spots where traffic flowed certain ways, people would would begin to line up. Never did figure that one out, but the mall was two levels with these wide open spaces where you could look down from the top, making for an excellent observation deck on human movement. We'd send a friend down to stand in one of the designated spots and sure enough, there'd be a few more distracted people behind him just waiting for nothing.
It is interesting how human psychology works. When my Dad was a kid, there was a park that normally cost money to be admitted into. Him and his brothers would sneak in though, and the owner did nothing about it. My Dad realized it's because when other kids saw my dad and his brothers having fun, they would bug their parents to pay for them to get in. Kids are pretty susceptible to copying each other I guess, and parents are easily influenced by their kids.
One night I was fresh off the plane in Barcelona and my friend had taken me to a restaurant for supper. Knowing plenty of Spanish and Romance languages, I could mostly figure out how to read menus and signs. I went to find the Men's Room which was downstairs.
I must've pushed the door instead of pulling it, then I decided it was locked, and so I loitered there waiting for the other guy to exit the bathroom, and I waited a long time, being still rather disoriented in a foreign country for the first time.
And one guy emerged, and I tested the door again, but decided it had locked behind him. A second guy came out and I was like "hey wait, this is not a one-man room!" And that is when I rediscovered how bathroom doors work.
Nothing in this scenario was actually unfamiliar or unusual, but I suppose being in Catalonia instead of the U.S., I expected it to be so!
The phones said "OUT OF SERVICE". Are you going to flood the bathroom because you tried to flush a toilet with an ” OUT OF ORDER” sign? Are you going to try and ride elevators that say "OUT OF SERVICE"? Do you leave fingerprints on the wall because you wanted to see if the sign that says “WET PAINT” is actually true?
If someone says “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t give me your money” does it matter that the gun is empty and you are just “psychologically” compelled, rather than physically?
If I see a device with an operational screen displaying out of order, and bits hanging off of it designed for my interaction, I would 100% go mess around to see if I can fix it. In fact I probably did this in the course of discovering this quirk.
Curosity takes energy. If life is going to shit, and that phonecall is your lifeline, you usually have no mental bandwidth left for someone screwing around.
If your laptop stalls out you turn it off and on again.
If you rock up to a pedestrian crossing, and you dont know if the button has been pressed, you give it a good tap to make sure its been done.
If theres 2 handsets you havent even examined, without humans, and a line behind human A using a phone you can be reasonably expected to go jingle the handset of one of the unused ones.
And the repeatable result is still both interesting and novel to me.
People are responsible for their own actions. Just like Dell has never been held morally accountable for some kid getting punched in the face, neither is the state of a payphone handset.
I get it, this is a fun game redditors play to turn normal people into monsters using therapy words. But dont expect me to play along.
People are responsible, yes. But that still does not stop the consequences happening. Like the consequences for you enjoying being a dick to everyone around you. I'm not the only one who has given you warnings here. Some self reflection would not go amiss.
"But they could have just ..." does not take away the fact that the impact on their lives was real. An impact that you caused.
Again, discovering this situation via what you call an "experiment" wasn't perhaps bad outright. But the longer it went and the more you guys were observing that people actually behaved that way and how negatively they were affected was less and less justifiable.
Any scientific experiment involving humans or animals nowadays requires ethics considerations and approval by an ethics board. For good reason. Just saying "well they could just ..." is not good enough.
That's a weird, thoroughly unempathic - not to use the word sociopathic - take. A queue in front of a phone box means everyone thinks the other ones are out of order. The large majority of the time, the phones will indeed be thoroughly out of order, and the majority of the rest of the time, people don't think they have the skills to make them work again. Not taking your place in the queue means you may well lose a spot or two as you try to figure it out. It's totally rational to queue, so a very poor experiment.
The Brady Bunch, Season 1 Episode 9: "Sorry, Right Number"
Airdate: November 21, 1969
A huge phone bill prompts Mike to have a pay telephone installed to teach the kids a lesson in financial responsibility. His plan nearly backfires when he is forced to use the payphone to close a deal. Thankfully, his client has three teenagers of his own and understands Mike's situation and even installs a pay phone in his own home.
Beats letting them rot or turning them into novelty coffee stands. It's kinda cool how these relics are finding second lives in ways that actually help people
I try this anytime I get tired of a phone tree, works about half the time. Useful trick I picked up from someone twice my age and has paid dividends in time saved.
I actually think these use cellular connections behind the scenes. It wasn't explicitly stated but when I watched a video there was a brief shot of a 4G modem.
I lived on Whidbey Island in Washington for a few years, and the quaintest thing (well, one of them, the whole island is just that) is the free payphones all over. I think only free for calls on the island but still.
Most people would not even know the phone number of their friends and don't carry a notebook anymore for that, so the utility of those is very limited if your phone's battery is dead
The only phone numbers I still have memorized is my two home phone numbers for like 20 and 30 years ago. The touch tone song is still burned in my brain. Can't remember my best friends' numbers though. I would probably recognize them though if someone told them to me, not that they're any good anymore anyway.
I worked as a tech on an art project involving a phone booth on a public square and every few hours I was there I'd see some children go in and try to talk. There were two unused booths, so on a few occasions I saw sibling go into them and "talk" to each other. The phones weren't plugged in, but my plan for this year is to set up an intercom between them. I also saw a lot of parent take their kids up to the booths and tell them about what it was like when we didn't have phones in our pockets.
> Back in the 1980s and 90s I had lots of phone numbers memorized,
> now I don’t even know my wife’s phone number.
I think this is all of us who were born before the Reagan admin.
For my part, I combined both things you brought up. I have 10 numbers that are ~same as the ones I grew up with and they forward to the family phones (50¢ea/mo, MVNO)
When traveling, I always try to use local payphones and call friends or just myself. Maybe the name is not quite apt because the phone service is often provided for free.
Somebody set up a pay phone (free) at Burning Man years ago. They had to tie it to a satellite link, because cell phone service hadn't reached Black Rock yet.
In early days of 3G, I had unlimited data and a hotspot that took a PCMCIA EVDO card. I also had SIP adapter w/ pulse dialing and a spot on my minivan dashboard that would have perfectly held a candlestick phone.
Except I could never find a dang phone (that I could afford).
It will certainly have a side effect of attracting bums. Just as park benches and other things people in the community tend to fight against, or even vandalise themselves to prevent them from becoming bum magnets.
Australia's primary operator of payphones made them all free a couple of years ago. More as a way to keep them as advertising space than any particular good-will gesture.
Also likely with a view to using them as locations for 5G/6G/WiFi access points, as cell sizes get smaller.
Still, I guess if the end result is functional public phones and revenue to keep them around, it's not the worst tradeoff
In Shanghai there are some phone-booth-looking objects you can find on the sidewalk that advertise free wifi. I've never investigated how to use the free wifi, but presumably someone might.
You need to be mobile subscriber to that network or else pay per use e.g if booth is China Telecom then if you have CT mobile service the "hotspot" is bundled. If you are say a CMCC user then you can pay to use after registering.
It's modelled on the same way that HongKong pay phone booths from PCCW were setup a long time ago.
That's actually better than I expected, considering how the airport wifi in Pudong was impossible to use for non-Chinese. (There was a verification procedure involving something external...) I think that's changed now?
Still, if you're already subscribed to the mobile service, wifi on the sidewalk isn't worth much.
In St Petersburg all payphones were made free for calls to local and mobile numbers around 5 years ago, but most of them disappeared since then.
I’ve seen some in Moscow, too, and I think actually every Rostelecom payphone is free now (something about the universal communication services project I guess). In Russian: https://www.company.rt.ru/projects/uus/
Every time we walk past one I somehow get a prank call from my kids :-), I think it's great they are free.
Yeah, plus compared to having to maintain and empty the change mechanisms or removing them all it was probably the cheaper option.
Sad really, because I liked holding the flag button down before picking up the receiver, which displays OUT OF SERVICE until the receiver is lifted again.
I would find a bank of 3 busy payphones on a weekend, get 2 of them to display the message, and sit there with my mates laughing at the long line of payphone users.
Last I tried, this no longer worked on the free Telstra payphones. End of a mildly amusing prank era.
That's not a prank, it's just idiotic.
We all did stupid things when young, but most of us have by now realized that what they did wasn't actually funny.
It's not about funny. I have observed it in dogs and young children. It's about taking action in the world and receiving (any) feedback that your actions have an impact. That's the origin of pranks, negging, playing. It's quite an important development step, imho.
Definitely.
But it also means acknowledging later on that it was actually harmful to others.
I was also really good at prank phone calls if you have a handful of therapy words to throw at me over that.
Its a lesson in human behaviour. And like all young people we were interested in what makes society tick. We were daring rogue anthropologists.
You get the 3 payphones.
If you have them all present the message, someone gets curious and lifts a handset, resolving the issue.
But if you disable only 2, everyone just lines up behind the working payphone. Its a repeatable experiment, one we performed everywhere we saw telstra payphones.
Apologies if you happen to be a disgruntled telstra payphone user.
As you grow up and experience more of life you come to realise that you thought of as harmless “pranks” probably had a real impact on people’s lives.
Who knows that the people in that queue were trying to do or who they were trying to contact.
It’s only by experiencing these moment and stresses ourselves that gives us the perspective to put ourselves in others shoes and gain empathy.
They were only psychologically limited. Thats the point. All someone has to do is pick up the handset and the condition clears. Instead they line up, flocking with other humans. A human being curious enough to lift a second handset immediately resolves the issue. The experiment just demonstrates how rare that condition is. And judging by your responses I feel like you would not have been curious enough to either lift a handset or identify the method to create the condition in the first place.
I don't know why you are getting dogged on for this. Yeah, it was probably annoying in a variety of ways to those people, but it demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate us when we are in an agitated state. This is the number one weapon of modern scammers.
As an aside-but-related experiment, I worked in a bookstore in an American mall when I was young. It was always rather quiet in our store compared to the rest of the mall, so when someone purchased something, our cash register noise could be heard through the whole bookstore. After awhile, I realized every time someone made a purchase, I'd end up with a line formed almost immediately behind them. It seemed like the cash register noise triggered some Pavlovian response to the customers still browsing in the store, as though they needed to hurry up and get it line before it got too long.
So, I tried an experiment. When nobody was in line and we had customers milling about, I'd run a mid-day report from my register which sounded similar to someone making a purchase. Lo and behold, people lined up, almost absent-mindedly. Every customer did not come when called by the register, but most did. I'd be hard-pressed to repeat the experiment today with the tap payments and touchscreens, though.
Same mall, a few years later, we also realized that if we stood outside a store or kiosk in very specific spots where traffic flowed certain ways, people would would begin to line up. Never did figure that one out, but the mall was two levels with these wide open spaces where you could look down from the top, making for an excellent observation deck on human movement. We'd send a friend down to stand in one of the designated spots and sure enough, there'd be a few more distracted people behind him just waiting for nothing.
Maybe humans secretly love to queue :)
It is interesting how human psychology works. When my Dad was a kid, there was a park that normally cost money to be admitted into. Him and his brothers would sneak in though, and the owner did nothing about it. My Dad realized it's because when other kids saw my dad and his brothers having fun, they would bug their parents to pay for them to get in. Kids are pretty susceptible to copying each other I guess, and parents are easily influenced by their kids.
One night I was fresh off the plane in Barcelona and my friend had taken me to a restaurant for supper. Knowing plenty of Spanish and Romance languages, I could mostly figure out how to read menus and signs. I went to find the Men's Room which was downstairs.
I must've pushed the door instead of pulling it, then I decided it was locked, and so I loitered there waiting for the other guy to exit the bathroom, and I waited a long time, being still rather disoriented in a foreign country for the first time.
And one guy emerged, and I tested the door again, but decided it had locked behind him. A second guy came out and I was like "hey wait, this is not a one-man room!" And that is when I rediscovered how bathroom doors work.
Nothing in this scenario was actually unfamiliar or unusual, but I suppose being in Catalonia instead of the U.S., I expected it to be so!
The phones said "OUT OF SERVICE". Are you going to flood the bathroom because you tried to flush a toilet with an ” OUT OF ORDER” sign? Are you going to try and ride elevators that say "OUT OF SERVICE"? Do you leave fingerprints on the wall because you wanted to see if the sign that says “WET PAINT” is actually true?
If someone says “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t give me your money” does it matter that the gun is empty and you are just “psychologically” compelled, rather than physically?
If I see a device with an operational screen displaying out of order, and bits hanging off of it designed for my interaction, I would 100% go mess around to see if I can fix it. In fact I probably did this in the course of discovering this quirk.
Curosity takes energy. If life is going to shit, and that phonecall is your lifeline, you usually have no mental bandwidth left for someone screwing around.
If your laptop stalls out you turn it off and on again.
If you rock up to a pedestrian crossing, and you dont know if the button has been pressed, you give it a good tap to make sure its been done.
If theres 2 handsets you havent even examined, without humans, and a line behind human A using a phone you can be reasonably expected to go jingle the handset of one of the unused ones.
And the repeatable result is still both interesting and novel to me.
No. Someone who is at the end of their rope does none of those things.
They break the laptop. They throw it out the window. They cross the road without looking.
And confronted with a kid messing around, they punch them in the face.
People have limits. Don't risk yourself by finding what everyone else's is.
People are responsible for their own actions. Just like Dell has never been held morally accountable for some kid getting punched in the face, neither is the state of a payphone handset.
I get it, this is a fun game redditors play to turn normal people into monsters using therapy words. But dont expect me to play along.
People are responsible, yes. But that still does not stop the consequences happening. Like the consequences for you enjoying being a dick to everyone around you. I'm not the only one who has given you warnings here. Some self reflection would not go amiss.
"But they could have just ..." does not take away the fact that the impact on their lives was real. An impact that you caused.
Again, discovering this situation via what you call an "experiment" wasn't perhaps bad outright. But the longer it went and the more you guys were observing that people actually behaved that way and how negatively they were affected was less and less justifiable.
Any scientific experiment involving humans or animals nowadays requires ethics considerations and approval by an ethics board. For good reason. Just saying "well they could just ..." is not good enough.
Yeah no sorry you can make me out to be evil all you like, but I dont see how any harm was caused or intended.
That's a weird, thoroughly unempathic - not to use the word sociopathic - take. A queue in front of a phone box means everyone thinks the other ones are out of order. The large majority of the time, the phones will indeed be thoroughly out of order, and the majority of the rest of the time, people don't think they have the skills to make them work again. Not taking your place in the queue means you may well lose a spot or two as you try to figure it out. It's totally rational to queue, so a very poor experiment.
And I'm curious enough to have patents.
You are a bit late to patent a novel device for testing payphone service status.
The Brady Bunch, Season 1 Episode 9: "Sorry, Right Number"
Airdate: November 21, 1969
A huge phone bill prompts Mike to have a pay telephone installed to teach the kids a lesson in financial responsibility. His plan nearly backfires when he is forced to use the payphone to close a deal. Thankfully, his client has three teenagers of his own and understands Mike's situation and even installs a pay phone in his own home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Brady_Bunch_episod...
About "new life", reminded me of phone booths in UK being reused as defibrillation stations:
https://nerdist.com/article/uk-red-phone-booths-defibrillati...
Communities can 'adopt' them for £1. Other uses include libraries or food bank donation points.
https://business.bt.com/public-sector/street-hubs/adopt-a-ki...
Beats letting them rot or turning them into novelty coffee stands. It's kinda cool how these relics are finding second lives in ways that actually help people
https://futel.net/ operates similar free public telephones in Portland, OR.
From https://randtel.co/
> RandTel was started in 2023, inspired by Futel [1] and PhilTel [2].
[1] https://futel.net/about/ [2] https://philtel.org/about/
Beat me to it.
Street Roots has had one for about a month on Burnside and Third.
In Switzerland the payphones that remain (150 Telecabs 2000 [1]) all have free calling within Switzerland[2].
[1] https://img.nzz.ch/2014/04/14/1.18283856.1397466801.jpg
[2] https://www.swisscom.ch/de/about/news/2019/11/28-publifon.ht...
I'd really like to know if they're still around and where they are...
They still are, you can find then on this website : https://www.apgsga.ch/apg-ecommerce-platform/apg-product-fin...
https://philtel.org/ out of Philadelphia
Operator: Dial 0
Is this still a thing? I haven't tried in years.
For a sec I thought if I knew his carrier I could answer that. But no; I have no idea if any telcos still do 0=Operator.
One of the phones said RanTel Operator: Dial 0. Backdrop?
I try this anytime I get tired of a phone tree, works about half the time. Useful trick I picked up from someone twice my age and has paid dividends in time saved.
> I try this anytime I get tired of a phone tree
You're thinking of a corp phone system. I'm wondering whether carriers still do operators. If you pick up your phone and dial 0, what do you get?
I get a pre-recorded message telling me how to perform a collect call and who to contact for help with my specific carrier
Nice. I appreciate this data point.
Wow! The resource load from Core77.com's website is unusually high and I can't quite figure out why. Ublock is working overtime.
Cell service fails, batteries die, disasters happen... but a solar-powered rotary payphone? That's gonna ring through it all.
I actually think these use cellular connections behind the scenes. It wasn't explicitly stated but when I watched a video there was a brief shot of a 4G modem.
I lived on Whidbey Island in Washington for a few years, and the quaintest thing (well, one of them, the whole island is just that) is the free payphones all over. I think only free for calls on the island but still.
Not a whole lot of them left on the island. I don't remember them ever being free but last time I used one was probably in the 90's.
Most people would not even know the phone number of their friends and don't carry a notebook anymore for that, so the utility of those is very limited if your phone's battery is dead
The only phone numbers I still have memorized is my two home phone numbers for like 20 and 30 years ago. The touch tone song is still burned in my brain. Can't remember my best friends' numbers though. I would probably recognize them though if someone told them to me, not that they're any good anymore anyway.
I've got my childhood landline number permanently etched into my brain
There's no point in memorizing numbers anymore because unless I call from my phone, nobody will pick up anyway.
Very true!
I like the idea and the looks of it, but do they get any usage (beyond the test calls)?
It will be hard to overcome a lot of gaps in education
- where is a phone (he seems to have signs "phone inside"), what kind of device am I even looking for, visually?
- is this operational? did someone forget this on the wall?
- how do you operate the dial?
- do you even remember a phone number that is useful now? When the smartphone suddenly stops working?
Sadly, I would probably score 2/4 and not rely on it.
If I pointed my kids at one of those phones and said - Go see that that thing does. They would.
Without an adult to prompt them, I think most kids would. As long as their ambition hasn't been conditioned away.
I worked as a tech on an art project involving a phone booth on a public square and every few hours I was there I'd see some children go in and try to talk. There were two unused booths, so on a few occasions I saw sibling go into them and "talk" to each other. The phones weren't plugged in, but my plan for this year is to set up an intercom between them. I also saw a lot of parent take their kids up to the booths and tell them about what it was like when we didn't have phones in our pockets.
> do they get any usage (beyond the test calls)?
Usage stats: https://randtel.co/stats.html
Regarding the first one, the app icon of the phone app on smartphones still depicts a telephone receiver, so that should look somewhat familiar.
I dial important numbers by hand so that I remember them when I don't have my phone with me.
I may forget everything but I’ll always remember 867-5309
> do you even remember a phone number that is useful now?
This is the one that would get me. Back in the 1980s and 90s I had lots of phone numbers memorized, now I don’t even know my wife’s phone number.
> Back in the 1980s and 90s I had lots of phone numbers memorized,
> now I don’t even know my wife’s phone number.
I think this is all of us who were born before the Reagan admin.
For my part, I combined both things you brought up. I have 10 numbers that are ~same as the ones I grew up with and they forward to the family phones (50¢ea/mo, MVNO)
I have one friend's telephone number memorized, but he has had it for 40-plus years. My wife's and my son's? Well, they are stored on my phone.
When I realized the only practical numbers I knew were my home phone number from 1995 and my cell, I made it a point to memorize my wife’s.
When traveling, I always try to use local payphones and call friends or just myself. Maybe the name is not quite apt because the phone service is often provided for free.
That's such a cool little travel ritual... kinda like sending yourself a postcard, but more ephemeral
Somebody set up a pay phone (free) at Burning Man years ago. They had to tie it to a satellite link, because cell phone service hadn't reached Black Rock yet.
In early days of 3G, I had unlimited data and a hotspot that took a PCMCIA EVDO card. I also had SIP adapter w/ pulse dialing and a spot on my minivan dashboard that would have perfectly held a candlestick phone.
Except I could never find a dang phone (that I could afford).
Has cell service reached Black Rock now?
Probably portable systems for Burning Man.
https://cellsitesolutions.com/cell-on-wheels/
...Don't ask!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITfQGEASYvU&t=0m40s
It will certainly have a side effect of attracting bums. Just as park benches and other things people in the community tend to fight against, or even vandalise themselves to prevent them from becoming bum magnets.
If someone vandalizes a payphone I'd consider them a bum too.
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