All phones are payphones. Whether or not you pay for it a charge is levied somewhere by somebody to somebody else for the privilege of connecting your phone to another telephone.

Public Pay Telephones maintain a special distinction among other styles of payphones for their deliberate and stigmatized pay-as-you-go mechanism.

Yet, despite appearances, the economic reality is that customers pay to use cell- or land-line phones just as they might pay to use coin-operated public pay telephones.

All phones are payphones.

The Public Pay Telephone business has been dead for a long time. Public Pay Telephones do not survive as “pay telephones”. Today’s payphone does not survive on income from coin or calling card usage.

Costs associated with maintaining the phones, getting the coins out, maintaining payment mechanisms and coin slots etc., all those costs are nothing more than good money chasing bad. Simply maintaining these devices erases profit, forcing businesses and municipalities to find other ways to subsidize public phones.

The last decade has seen a number of attempts to breathe new life into public telephones. A recent experiment in New York has seen a number of payphones kiosks crowned with military-grade Wi-Fi antennæ, offering Free Wi-Fi to anyone who wants to use it. The initial goal of the pilot program is to gauge public interest in the free service. With sufficient interest the next goal would be to monetize it, potentially creating another revenue stream to support public telephones.

(I have used the free Wi-Fi a number of times. I have mixed feelings about this pilot program. I will write about it soon.)

What about other ideas? Is it still possible to make payphones profitable? Can the business of the standalone payphone simply break even with so little opportunity for monetization?

My first two ideas for making payphones profitable might seem contrary to the nature of the business, and they are anathema to the traditional payphone business, but I think they make sense in this year of 2012.

Idea #1: MAKE PAYPHONES FREE

Free to callers, that is. All phones are payphones and all phone calls cost someone money. But the cost of calls has become so cheap that giving them away to consumers makes more financial sense for public telephone companies than maintaining old-fashioned payment and collection systems. The business of public pay telephones makes little money from cash calls and thus it suffers under the costs associated with simply collecting the coins. Eliminating the payment mechanism and turning public pay telephones into PUBLIC TELEPHONES would erase the negligible amount of money going in to the phones, while saving considerably more money now spent on collecting the coins.

Idea #1a: MAKE PAYPHONES FREE — AGAIN

Making payphones freephones is a test that should be implemented again. That’s right: It’s been done before. The test failed but not for its lack of merit.

Popa Media, a display advertising company, set up a number of free phones around NYC in 2005. The phones offered 4 minutes of calling time. The cost of the calls was subsidized by money earned from ads placed on large display advertising panels.

As far as I know this Popa Free Phone on Steinway Street in Astoria is the only surviving relic of the failed “Popa Free Phone” experiment in New York. Others may still linger elsewhere in New York but I have not seen them.

This sorry-looking specimen of public telephony lost its dial tone years ago, as did all the other Popa Free Phones in New York which have disappeared. The old billboard platter advertising a defunct web site, however, has stood by for years.

The Popa Free Phone is a product that could have succeeded, according to payphonistas I have known.

(While typing this story I decided, just for the hell of it, to buy the domain name of that defunct web site and redirect it to my Mailbox Locator site. The Mailbox Locator can now be reached at GOTOTHEZIP.com. I just bought myself a billboard!)

It is time to try the free phone model again, leveraging not just display advertising for revenue but INTERSTITIAL COMMERCIAL ADVERTISEMENTS heard by both caller and callee. Calls made from free phones like this could be introduced by 5-second ads for local businesses, Internet web sites, or anything else.

Interstitial commercial advertising to subsidize free phone calls is not a new idea, either. It is, however, another relatively recent (and failed) attempt at offering free telephone calls through non-cash subsidies.

The company that tried it was Broadpoint Communications, and the product was called FREEWAY. Freeway offered its members a membership card and a confidential PIN with which to make free telephone calls anywhere in the United States. Calls were free in exchange for listening to advertisements throughout the call. I tried this service a handful of times and found the commercials surprisingly amusing, serving not as annoyances but as conversation fodder. I would not want to use something like Freeway exclusively but I had no problem with the advertising model.

For what it offered I found Broadpoint’s FREEWAY to be perfectly acceptable. A similar model of dropping commercial advertisements into calls made from public telephones could find a profit, further encouraging payphone owners to take the plunge and make their phones free for callers.

Here is my FreeWay Membership Card (ah, memories):

Idea #2: ALLOW PAYPHONES TO RECEIVE INCOMING CALLS

Payphones used to accept incoming calls as a matter of course, but this became anathema as businesses suffered from incoming calls made to these phones. Calls to payphones typically make no money and effectively cost the owner money by making the phone unavailable to other paying customers.

But simply allowing incoming calls won’t make payphones profitable — UNLESS THERE IS A CHARGE FOR THIS CONVENIENCE. This option would probably not be hugely popular but I think a need for this service exists and WITH PROPER AWARENESS a market for it could be crafted.

Someone in an emergency situation, or someone with no money or means of communication might simply need to receive a phone call at a public telephone. This used to be common but today’s payphones are mostly programmed to reject incoming calls.

It could also be used simply for fun and amusement, in the spirit of the original Payphone Project which encouraged people to reach out and call random payphones just to see who answered. Some folks wouldn’t mind paying 50¢ per call to try and reach out in this way. Some might even be encouraged to do it if they knew it might help support the survival of non-advertising-supported public telephones.

Other ideas which I think could find niche-level audiences:

Make custom content and access to toll-free services more available and better-known to payphone customers.

Many companies with toll-free services block payphone users from accessing their services. This is because of the potential for abuse of the FCC-mandated dial-around compensation fees which require that payphone owners receive about 50¢ for every completed toll-free call made from their phones.

Microsoft’s TellMe is an example of a service that payphone users are not allowed to use but which would be of special interest to that audience. E.H.U.C., in its infinite thoughtfulness (I really love that payphone company), has a workaround which allows its customers to access Microsoft’s TellMe service. Other companies should follow suit. More and more obvious access to these kind of services would draw occasional use. As long as dialaround compensation fees remain in effect this could inspire a quick pop in earnings for certain payphone locations.

This idea, once again, is not exactly new. As I reported on Payphone News last year, E.H.U.C. bypasses Microsoft’s payphone blocking to allow access to TellMe from its phones. As this photo of a San Diego payphone shows, however, it is not uncommon for payphone owners to encourage their customers to access toll-free services via touch-tone shortcuts. The detail of this photo is not clear but it shows that this payphone contained a sticker listing “FREE CALLS” to services like Chase Bank, a daily prayer, and a current weather summary. Each of these calls, I assume, made the payphone owner about 50¢ in FCC-mandated dial-around compensation fees.

Miscellaneous ideas to either save public telephones or raise awareness of their value …

Promotional events.

Allow free calls on Mothers Day, Fathers Day, and on Christmas Day. And while you’re at it, allow free calls from public telephones during emergency situations such as the east coast blackout of 2003 or the earthquake of 2010. Both these incidents proved that cell phones are not reliable in large-scale incidents. Unfortunately the minor earthquake of 2010 also proved that public telephones are no longer a realistic option either. With so many payphones removed over the last many years there were simply none to be found as cell phone signals died after a very minor earthquake. During the first hour so after the earthquake made its impact I found myself relying on word of mouth just to find what was happening 1 mile away.

More creative thinking.

Look at what the Red Cross of Mexico did. They rigged payphones with cameras and invited passers-by to deposit a few coins and have their picture taken and posted to their Facebook page. All proceeds went to the Red Cross.

Many parties of late have attempted to “revitalize” payphones with flowerpots and art-vandalism. As a payphone curmudgeon I just shrug at most of these projects.

The Mexican Red Cross’ project is one I can get behind, though. It leverages the payphone for what it is — A TELEPHONE — and advances its usefulness into the Internet age with a clever and productive re-purposing of the device.

Most independent payphone companies probably could not afford gimmicks like this on a large scale but as a promotional vehicle I think it could make an impact.

Payphone Service Providers should also consider the benefits of other forms of branding. Why doesn’t anyone in the payphone business today do what Verizon used to do? Each call made from a Verizon payphone was preceded by a message saying “THANK YOU FOR USING A VERIZON PAYPHONE”. Until recently one could could still hear the bass voice James Earl Jones making this announcement on some Verizon payphones.

After I deposit coins into most payphones I hear the automated “THANK YOU” message from a sour-sounding robot. I have never heard anyone thank me for using an East Harlem or Coastal Communications Payphone.

And why stop at simply thanking callers for using your payphone? Why not throw in something loopy and strange, like an automated fortune-cookie-style message or a 3-second horoscope. Turn payphones into miniature experiments in avant-garde poetry or experimental advertising and find that audience.

Stop hiding payphone numbers and locations

Tracing calls received from payphones was never meant to be easy. Today the continued secrecy of public information has the archaic and undesirable effect of making calls from payphones seem mysterious and weird. Why not make the locations of payphones available to the public? This, like other ideas I present in this story, is anathema to the traditional business of the payphone provider. But things have changed. As their numbers have decreased the value of public telephones has increased among those who need them — especially in emergency situations where cell phones have proven unreliable. Making payphone locations available would help in disaster-planning and, unlike previous eras where phreaking and theft were prime concerns, advertising your payphone locations actually seems like good business.

And — IF YOU MADE PAYPHONES FREE PHONES — you wouldn’t have to worry about the phones getting robbed for their money.

If there is still some national security terrorist security secrecy paranoia about identifying payphone locations then why not set the Caller ID for payphones to show the web address for the payphone owner? Instead of obfuscating caller ID information the way some payphone companies do (sending mystified callees to the Internet searchies to find who called them from where) why not announce to the callee that someone is calling them from a Titan360.com payphone in Times Square, or a VanWagner.com Payphone Kiosk on Roosevelt Island? It’s free and easy advertising.

I have a lot of ideas for the payphone business — more than would be sensible to continue with in this story. I am gnashing a bit, spilling garbage with credible ideas, but mental gnashing and cud-chewing is how creative thinking works.

I hope this story reaches out to anyone with an interest in keeping public telephones alive.