Talks only until January: Telekom turns off the last phone booths

Talks only until January
Telekom turns off the last phone booths

10/30/2022, 07:01

At its peak, the Bundespost operates more than 160,000 phone booths in Germany. But with the triumph of mobile phones, the profits are constantly diminishing. Therefore, Telekom wants to dismantle the last phones by 2025.

the Deutsche Telecom will turn off the last phone booths in Germany at the beginning of 2023. As one among others “Star” reported, the group informed cities and municipalities of the closure plans in a letter during the week. Consequently, the coin service will be suspended on November 21. With a phone card, calls should still be possible until the end of January.

According to this, around 12,000 public phone booths are still in operation. The decommissioning of the phones is scheduled to start in February and last until the beginning of 2025. According to the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, Telekom wants to use the newly gained space to improve the mobile phone network: small cells will be built in about a quarter part of the locations, that is, small antennas that amplify the signals of mobile phones.

The step is justified by the lack of use of the phone. “If almost everyone has a mobile phone in their pocket, it doesn’t make much sense to maintain expensive public infrastructure,” a spokesman for the German Association of Cities and Municipalities was quoted as saying by FAZ. “Nearly one in three public telephones did not invoice a single euro in sales last year,” a company spokesperson told the newspaper. In addition to operating costs, booth rental and cleaning, there are always costs to repair damage caused by vandalism and theft.

In service since 1881

The development had already been noted in recent years. In 2019 there were still almost 17,000 phone booths in the network, in January 2022 the number was only 14,200, a decrease of almost 16 percent.

However, Telekom had stated earlier this year that a complete decommissioning was “currently not planned”. Rather, locations where there is corresponding demand could continue to operate, IT portal Golem reported. These included places with high public traffic, such as airports, train stations, and shopping streets.

The first telephone booth was installed in Berlin on January 12, 1881. Since the 1920s, yellow houses have been part of the urban landscape throughout Germany. At peak times, more than 160,000 were in service, first operated by the Bundespost and after reunification and privatization by Telekom.