Vienna loses the last telephone booth: Development in Taubengasse planned!

Vienna loses the last telephone booth: Development in Taubengasse planned!

The telephone booth in Taubengasse causes excitement among the residents - and not because of their usefulness. Rather, it is heavily dirty and neglected, the interior is stuffed with cigarettes and plastic bottles. Neighbors have been reporting for years that no one was seen there. District head Lea Halbwidl (SPÖ) has repeatedly pointed out the problems with telephone booths in the district and announced that the cell should be dismantled in the coming months. A1, the operator, is currently evaluating the dismantling of further and informs about the upcoming measures that are connected to the new Telecommunications Act, which comes into force at the end of the year and are no longer mentioned in the telephone booths. The obligation to provide public speaking agencies is therefore eliminated. MeinDienst Bookcases were converted.

In total, there are still around 11,000 telephone booths in Austria, the majority of which, namely 10,000, are public speaking agencies. According to a report by Futurezone have given calls for telephone booths in the past ten years. While in 2017 2.8 million minutes on phone booths were still on the phone, over 24 billion minutes are offset by the fixed and mobile network. "The use drops from year to year, and the company has become more and more unlucrative for A1," explains Klaus Steinmaurer from RTR. Because with the high mobile radio penetration, the need for telephone booths has dropped drastically.

The change in telephone booths

Where one telephone booth after another was once set up, many cities are currently devoting themselves to creative solutions. Some telephone booths in Vienna have already adopted new functions: In addition to open book cups, some have also been equipped with defibrillators or used as electricity filling stations for e-cars. A1 no longer has a compulsion to operate the telephone booths, since the cost equalization of the universal dienal equalization that the company received is eliminated with the new law.

In the current debate, the social aspects are also in the room. Young people and people with low incomes, which are dependent on cell phones without battery, still find a last starting point for telephone emergencies in telephone booths. In the future, access to emergency services will be guaranteed primarily via mobile communications. New regulations are intended to ensure that emergency calls will also be barrier-free, especially by introducing an SMS emergency call. This change illustrates how our communication behavior has changed, and the end of an era, in which telephone booths were once indispensable.