If you’re looking for a payphone to make a call these days, you’ll usually have to look long and hard—unless you’re in Spain, which still has 16,000 of them across the country.
For that you can thank the ‘universal service obligation’ that binds phone company Telefonica to maintain the public phone system, with a phone in working order for every 3,000 inhabitants in towns with more than 1,000 residents, and one for every 3,000 inhabitants in larger towns.
Telefonica would like the requirement to be dropped, and there may be wide support for that, since a survey showed that 88% of Spaniards say they have never used a payphone in their lives. Twenty years ago, before mobiles were ubiquitous, there were 55,000 payphones.
Of the 16,000 currently in use, half are almost never used, and three-quarters are unprofitable. The company says that overall, it loses €3 million a year on the service.
Photo: pawpopa3336/Depositphotos
