About 20,000 little-used red phone booths to be axed as mobiles reduce their relevance.
The Financial Times writes:
About half of Britain’s 40,000 public telephone boxes are set to disappear from the streets as BT scraps kiosks that attract more visitors wanting to ‘spend a penny’ than make a 60p phone call. The telecoms company’s phone booths, including 7,000 traditional red phone boxes, still handle about 33,000 calls a day, despite universal mobile phone ownership. Yet more than half the boxes lose money and about a third do not handle a single phone call in any given month.
Gerry McQuade, head of BT’s wholesale unit which runs the pay phones business, said he has speeded up plans to cull 20,000 phone boxes and focus on profitable locations. ‘Very few of them make any money as it stands. In aggregate, it costs us more to collect the money than the phone boxes generate,’ he said…
Around 2,400 phone boxes have heritage listing. The classic K6, designed by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1936, has also proved a hit in the second-hand market as collectors around the world have rushed to own their own red phone box. Specialist companies recondition and sell the old phone boxes, which stand more than 8ft tall and weigh 750kg.
