Are there any situations where it would be desirable to keep some payphones around? Potentially in some sort of natural disaster where cell towers get knocked down, or at least reduced in capacity to the point where it's no longer possible to reliably make calls?
There was a situation in Canada a year or two ago where one of our two main wireless providers rolled out a bad firmware update to all of their transmitters at the same time and had a system wide outage for nearly nine hours, I could imagine a need for payphones if something like that were to happen in NYC.
There was a situation in Canada a year or two ago where one of our two main wireless providers rolled out a bad firmware update to all of their transmitters at the same time and had a system wide outage for nearly nine hours, I could imagine a need for payphones if something like that were to happen in NYC.