Maine Joins Fight to Keep Pay Phones

[dArKeR]

FAYETTE, Maine - Along a hilly stretch of road in central Maine, there's no cell phone service for more than a mile.

Callers once used the pay phone outside the Fayette Country Store, but that ended when the phone company, despite objections, removed it. Customers who need to make toll calls now are told to drive a few miles to use a pay phone at the Readfield Post Office.

Around the state and country, similar scenes are playing out as telephone companies remove unprofitable pay phones. In Maine alone, the 8,200 pay phones available to the public in 1998 dropped to 4,500 by 2003, according to state Rep. Herbert Adams.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=519&e=6&u=/ap/20050406/ap_on_re_us/pay_phones


Here's a great example of corporations rolling over a people with no lobby group or voice. I hate cell phones and I've travelled a bit since 1987 and what a nightmare experience it is using the Ameircan payphones. They're busted. They don't take incoming calls, the excuse was drug dealers use them. When they ofen do take your money with no service given just try to get your money back. I've talked to so many levels of American management trying to find out how to get the money back. It's either, "we don't own it sorry" "you'll have to contact the owner we just use the line..."

Who do you think this is going to effect more? Then poor people will have to drive, use gas money, oil, wear-tear, more to find another pay phone. I'm sure the Pope wouldn't like this hardship on the poor, who he fought for. Shame on Corporations!

[MADem]

1. There used to be two payphones within a reasonable walk from my home

...now there are none. The bastards are bound and determined to put everyone in cellphone/brain cancer hell.

[Goldom]

2. I just read all that trying to figure out

why some guy joining the Marines would help save the pay phone... then i read the title again.

[sleipnir]

5. ME TOO!

Ha, that's too funny.

[UCLA Dem]

3. Don't you just love deregulation!

:sarcasm:

[d.l.Green]

4. Wait a minute, isn't there one of those taxes on our phone bills

that's supposed to pay for rural service? Or has that been redirected into some other coffer now?

[unhappycamper]

6. did you know that it costs telephone companies

$0.008 (yes, that is correct - .8 cents) to deliver one minute of long distance anywhere in the continental United States? All of the necessary infrastructure was bought and paid for decades ago.