I'm a payphone product manager in a very large RBOC. What types of services would you like to see at payphones in your area? If you could get free information with the touch of a button, would you seek out a specific brand of payphone? If the price of a call could be billed to your home number, would you use the payphone more often? What could we do to discourage you from using your cell phone and encourage you to use the payphone?

Make them free.Take that pay off that phone.

The revenue that is earned from a payphone is shared by a number of people. The majority of calls "sold" at payphones are in a sense, free. Dial around traffic (calls to 800 numbers etc.) represent a significant portion of the calls generated by a phone. Although the company that provides the 800 number gets the revenue for the network traffic, the payphone provider is lucky to get 24-cents in PCC. The payphone user ties up a resource to place the call, but usually pays nothing. The location owner also gets a significant cut of the payphone revenue. What's left is used to pay the line expense, equipment costs, labor, and permit fees. The payphone provider earns a profit only if there is anything left over. The sad truth is.....if they were free, they wouldn't exist. Even advertiser subsidized services like free ISPs are finding that they have to charge something to survive. Nothing is free. All limited resources have a value. Would it help if the payment was delayed?

Make the payphone fit in my pocket so i can take it whith me so I dont have to stand out in the cold waiting for a homeless person to beg for change, makeing me lie and tell him i dont have change as i am using change to make a call on the payphone, while smelling the rotten garbage smell that rolls out of the dumpster and rolls off the bum who is now peeing on my leg because i did not give him any change......

how big are your pockets and are they soaked in urine?

I would use payphones all the time if they had integrated slot machines that PAID OFF. There's an idea! Payphones that PAY OFF! It's all yours Mr. Payhone!

By the way, Trace, you don't have to lie and say you don't have change. Just say: "NO. I WON'T GIVE YOU MONEY."

All I want to see in payphphones is a coin slot for pennies..also make one that takes the washers the size of quarters you can get at the local hardware store for 1 dollar per 100....or maybe one that will actually let a tone dialer werk.....thass a start

I'm a worthless piece of cow dung that finds pleasure in tormenting small domestic animals and stealing from pay phone companies. I pick up aluminum cans from dumpsters so I can earn enough pocket change to buy quarter size slugs at hardware stores. Sometimes I steal from them too. I can't wait to make license plates as a lifetime career.

Mr. Payphone i wouldn't be to worried about us using our cell phones instead of a payphone. cell phones are just to hard to make free calls from.

Make them so when the call doesn't go through,you REALLY get your change back.

If they're regular payphones, take off the damn mic-mute! I would also like to see more exposed wires. Information with a touch of a button? How about the latest H/P news? As for charging a call to your home phone, sure, as long as you dont verify that it is, in fact, my home phone, and not somebody else's.

sounds good to me Visual Assassin while there at it they may as well leave the keys to the coin box sitting there.

There should be more payphones everywhere. Even in backwater cities, like the kind that I live in. And maybe payphones could blow hot air in your face, for those that live in colder climates...cough,cough,new hampshire,cough......or cold air for hotter climates. It would be nice...

I would also like it if payphones were easier to destroy.

Well Visual Assassin, you got your wish. Roughly 178,000 Bell South payphones will disappear within two years. A once vital business has been destroyed.

Must be someone new. Because that last posting wasn't from this Watcher.

Um..watcher takes things too seriously.

Combining the payphone and the slot machine is a real winner! Imagine the revenue you'd get with that, Mr. Payphone! People lining up at the payphones at the chance of winning at the slot machine. And if they won, the first thing they would do would be to CALL SOMEBODY and tell them the good news.