Who has not gone to a city in the United Kingdom and has not taken the typical photo inside the typical telephone booths of the country? For some time now, the use of phone booths has dropped so much that their maintenance has begun to be detrimental to the coffers of BT, the company in charge of offering to manage them. According to the BT company There are currently around 40.000 phone booths handling an average of 33.000 calls a day, but a third of them are not used at any time to make calls. In addition, most of them are an economic burden that does not generate income and repair costs are increasingly high.
In the next five years, BT will phase out half of the cabs currently available in operation nationwide. Of the 40.000 existing today, which have a running cost of £ 6 million per year, only 7.000 are the typical red booths that have become so popular around the world and that appear in the majority of photographs of all the people who visit London. The design of these cabins dates back to 1935 to celebrate 25 years on the throne of King George V.
The disappearance of the phone booths will be accompanied by an installation of InLinkUK, a device that will offer free calls to telephones in the country, free Wi-Fi connection, device recharge as well as information on maps, telephone numbers in addition to allowing calls to emergency telephones. . At present we can find 750 modern cabins of this type distributed throughout London and the main English cities, a number that will gradually increase as telephone booths disappear.