Discussion
brd529: This is amazing
FugeDaws: Damn this needs building for the UK payphones there are a dying breed too and they used to be everywhere
xd1936: Incredible idea. I love this so much.
brodouevencode: more Silicon Valley/California xenophilia? </sarcasm>
pjmlp: In Germany some of the booths were converted into public libraries, those that people use to freely exchange books.They are rare, but I have already spot some in the wild.
cameronjpr: I love this, it's so creative. The audio recordings were a great idea
p4bl0: This is amazing. I would love to have this game in France!The "love letter to a disappearing piece of infrastructure" bit makes me think of the payphone pictures that are published in each of 2600 magazine issues: https://www.2600.com/payphones
FugeDaws: yeh UK went from 100,000+ now i think theres 20,000 left half of those i bet dont work
rickcarlino: Please expand this to other states. This is such a fun and creative idea.
tantalor: Would benefit from seasons i.e. wipe the leaderboard every once in a while
bknis53423: As a GIS programmer and a payphone nerd. I love love love this.
thaack: This works because California requires licensing for payphones and Riley was able to FOIA state payphone database. I'm not sure if other states require licenses for payphones.
jasonjayr: How is it verifying the calling line? Via ANI, or CID?
libria: Trying to win this from your couch, I see...
jasonjayr: It's in good fun, physically visiting them is way more fun than handing a SIP trunk to a short script + CSV file.The nerd in me is just always curious about the backend :)
summermusic: Real world exploration games like this and Jet Lagged: The Game Hide and Seek are just so cool.I’d play it if payphones from my state were included! I don’t know if they are licensed/registered here though.
acrophiliac: I know of a working payphone that is not on the Payphone Go map. Photo: https://i.postimg.cc/Dw4sCDpJ/payphone.jpg The fact that I know of one makes me wonder, are there are others? Is the list the author obtained from PUC incomplete? Is this phone operating unlicensed? Has the phone died since I last visited a year ago?
analyte123: Please consider extending the game at least by a couple weeks! I’m very curious what percent of all California payphones could be captured with an extended game. I know the game’s phone number isn’t free but I’m sure it could be largely covered by donations.Without even going and playing the game yet, it’s already let me understand more of the local geography. Lots of small nursing homes, behavioral institutions, and halfway houses have a payphone. Places that thankfully I haven’t had to think about and didn’t even know were there. I doubt most of these will be captured.Many have lamented the demise of the payphone but it really bears repeating. If someone loses or is robbed of their phone, they have to rely on the trust of strangers (when they may be looking pretty rough themselves) or scrape up $20-40 for a prepaid phone at a store that’s open, rather than calling at a payphone that’s open 24/7 for 25 or 50 cents or even for free with a collect call.
MarkusWandel: Another cool "just get out there" thing is the Degree Confluence Project. Just checked, and even the web site is still old school. https://confluence.org/My personal contribution: https://confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=3402
MarkusWandel: Anyway would love to play this payphone game, if only as an excuse for bike outings, but it's only for California and I don't live there.
teddyh: If you just want to find a payphone: <https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2lHO>
macintux: Apropos of absolutely nothing, and impossible to prove, but I've long suspected I might be the youngest person in the U.S. to have won tickets from radio stations both from a rotary phone (at home, ~1989) and from a payphone (while I was delivering pizzas ~1990).Unfortunately I've never really taken advantage of my absurd luck to do something more useful, like retire early.
drkrab: In Denmark there are no payphones. Like none. The copper network is being decommissioned.
citizenpaul: The recording left on this one is super weird and creepy like its from some ARG game which I guess is appropriate.The next night we ate whale, the next night we ate whale.https://walzr.com/payphone-go/?phone=592Runner Up this one playing "Im at a payphone" songhttps://walzr.com/payphone-go/?phone=576
tadfisher: Landline phone calls should just be free at this point. Put like 0.0001% of mobile profit into a fund and surely you can maintain the existing POTS payphone base. POTS-quality voice is like a rounding error in bandwidth, but we're saddled with POTS-era costs for connections.
cyberax: It's not the traffic but the CO equipment and copper line maintenance.
flyinghamster: That's happening piecemeal in the US as well. Any "landline" phone service at this point will be coming from a box hooked up to your internet service, quite the flip from the old days of dialup internet.
lapetitejort: I just visited the closest one to me during lunch. There was just a single dot in the middle of a huge county building. I had to walk through security to get there. I asked if there was a payphone around and the guard said no. Luckily someone else knew. One out of two phones didn't work. The other did, so now my best clean original joke can be heard by anyone.There are three other phones in my city, two in a hospital, one in potentially a corrections facility? I'll stop by on my way hope.
kmoser: > Every payphone has a unique phone number. When you call (888) 683-6697, I see the number you're calling from and match it in my database.Has anybody tried to win by spoofing the caller ID? For science, of course.
mx60s: the whale thing is from a really great poem by Tao Lin. You can watch him perform the whole thing on youtube
tl2do: Quick telephony question: how can calls from payphones to (888) 683-6697 be toll-free for the caller? I’m Japanese, so I may be missing something, but I don’t understand the mechanism that makes this free (or low-cost enough) to run as a free service.
slim: the owner of the (888) 683-6697 line pays for incoming calls
jcrawfordor: I've been peripherally involved in an early stages effort to build something similar for the entire nation (https://reportapayphone.com/), and became aware of this just recently. It's a really great example to aspire to, in terms of the level of polish. I do find the time limiting odd; our goal is to identify as many payphones as possible this way.Unfortunately the state of payphone-related records is extremely poor, with many ostensibly-active PSPs having quietly gone out of business, other PSPs reorganized without reregistering, and states themselves keeping PSP records very poorly. Throw in small-scale COCOT operations and the result is that there really isn't any authoritative database of possible payphones, so this website's map is going to be missing some. It will also include many that are nonfunctional, as today's PSPs seem to do close to zero maintenance and out of service phones stay that way for years.Some of the nation's largest PSPs have become ghosts, with the phones still operating and able to accept payment, but the PSP completely unresponsive to efforts to contact them. It's a very strange afterlife.
dom96: This is really cool, I wonder if it would be doable in other countries? In particular UK?
jonty: See my comment elsewhere in this thread...
jonty: We actually ran something similar in the UK a couple of years ago but had to shut it down due high costs.However we recently figured out how to do it in a way that won't bankrupt us, so keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks...https://payphone.team
citizenpaul: You are underestimating just how many people that are out there that want free long distances calls lol. I worked at a phone company and this was a never ending persistent security issue. There are lots of tricky ways to get someone to pay for your long distance call. If the pay phone was free then the local provider would be on the hook for those calls.Just block long distance calls right? If it was that simple it would not be a persistent issue.
ihaveone: That is super fun, if I had a motorcycle in Cali, I would so do this!
toast0: I still have a copper landline direct to a real central office; for my Mother in Law. $60/month and the phone company made it very difficult to setup 3 years ago; they really don't seem to want to be a phone company anymore.Pulse dialing still works, and the automated voicemail system that the CO switch runs has zero perceptible latency (unfortunately, they won't give me the PIN to set it up)
toast0: Most countries have some numbers with receiver pays or reverse billing as a feature. Sometimes called 'free phone'.My research says Japan has several prefixes, 0120, 0800, 0088, 0531, although not all phone numbers in these prefixes are available to all callers.In the US, holders of a toll free number pay their carrier a per minute rate (sometimes with billing increments of 1 second), as well as a fee per call from payphones.The per minute pricing is pretty reasonable typically one or two cents per minute; I think the per call cost from a payphone are more significant, although I don't see this listed by most providers; I seem to recall it being pretty hefty (and some toll free numbers would not accept calls from payphones as a result), but maybe changes in the network and intercarrier billing have resulted in a smaller fee or it's just not relevant to most people because payphones are hard to find.
shevy-java: I think every modern state should have some emergency phones. Not everyone has a smartphone, available at all times.
IncreasePosts: I'm sure most strangers or businesses would call 911 for you if you asked and appeared to need it
analyte123: 911 is not going to notify your friends, family, or employer about whatever situation you’re in. They are most likely not going to call a locksmith or tow truck for you either.The last person who wanted to use my phone introduced himself in a dark parking lot with, “hey man I just out of jail, can I use your phone to call my family?” …my $800 device with all my personal and financial data, photos, and logins on it? I consider myself a fairly helpful person but did not lend my phone that night.
ninalanyon: They don't need to be landlines. Just put a mobile phone in a steel box.
tl2do: Thanks. Your explanation can solve my question. In Japan, the receiver will pay for toll free call around 30 yen per call. Here it is difficult to run free service like Payphone Go considering the cost.
cyberax: There are phones like this along the highways. They also tend to use high-power microwave links instead of mobile networks, so they work even with no regular phone coverage.
ninalanyon: Same in Norway. There are about a hundred phone boxes left as protected objects. Most are used as free libraries as far as I can tell.
