Traditional phone boxes retain their importance in British society due to the reduced number of public conveniences that are open at night and the lack of approved advertising space for the world’s oldest profession.
InLink Limited limited: Firm that puts up UK's ad-supported phone booths enters administration
When Intersection first announced it was bringing LinkNYC's smart billboard technology to the UK in 2016, it promised to drag the humble telephone booth into the 21st century. Now a fairly common sight on London's streets, InLink booths include free phone calls, USB charging, and fast Wi-Fi access. This is supported by dynamic …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 16:38 GMT phuzz
Re: Ideally suited for those wishing to make drug deals
I assume that either there wasn't a phone box in those locations before InLink came along, or the phone was inoperable.
(Or possibly dealers were using the kiosks as a dry and snug office, with it's own landline, and were relying on it allowing incoming calls).
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 09:38 GMT Stumpy
Many local authorities refused permission for the InLink booths due to their association with criminality — specifically the drug trade.
So, what's the difference between a traditional BT Phonebooth and the InLink booths that would merit this reason for rejecting planning permission? I mean, it's been many years since I last had call to use a public phone, but last I recall, a BT payphone didn't require any form of registration or proof of ID so would be just as susceptible to this form of use.
Genuinely curious...
[... and just pipped to the post by the previous poster :) ]
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 10:06 GMT Stuart Castle
The likely reason might be it's already there. You only require planning permission for a phone box when it is being built, or replaced. It's much more difficult to get something removed, if it has been built than it is to refuse permission to build it.
Also, I don't think drugs and gang culture were quite the problem a few years ago they are now. Drugs and gangs aren't new by any means, but they weren't as prevalent. So, it's likely that they wouldn't have thought of drug and gang problems if planning permission were requested for a phone box, even 15-20 years ago. Of course, if they make any changes to those phone boxes that require planning permission, they might well consider drug and game problems now.
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 10:35 GMT Natasha Live
There was one outside a business I worked at. It was very popular with the street people. They would huddle around it, make a call and the run (yes run) to wherever the meeting point for their dealer was. Why did this happen? The machines allowed for very short FREE calls. Supposed to be for one off emergency calls to friends and family (no credit on mobile type calls) but the street people found it more useful for short dealer calls.
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 12:56 GMT juice
Well...
> So, what's the difference between a traditional BT Phonebooth and the InLink booths
Free phone calls to landlines and mobiles.
Anecdotally, the only time I've seen InLink booths being used for calls, it's been by people clutching tins of special brew and having a high-volume argument with the person at the other end.
OTOH, this does demonstrate how important low-cost infrastructure is to the economy, even - or especially - the black market. Be interesting to see how the local economy in Whitechapel etc were affected before and after the crackdown...
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 10:59 GMT JulieM
Simple Solution
The way to prevent payphones from being used for drug deals is to ban something more popular than drugs, and thereby squeeze drug dealers out.
Suppose they made coffee illegal. There is a greater market for coffee than crack cocaine, so more people would wind up using the phones for setting up illegal coffee deals.
Drug deals could then be conducted in code on Facebook and Twitter, e.g. Picture of ginger kitten = heroin, animated GIF of two black and white cats chasing each other = MDMA, death threat = meet me in the cemetery in half an hour.
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 11:46 GMT mark l 2
As well as traditional BT phone booths, you can still buy pay as you go SIM cards from places like pound shops and top them up with cash and so there are still plenty of way of making anonymous calls, text etc without having to use an inlink phone box. Although now we have a majority Tory government expect a lot more of your civil liberties to be taken away in areas such as that.
Where I live there are a few BT phone boxes and I do still see them getting used by people to make calls. I do know what surprises me more, people using the phone boxes or just people actually using a phone for speaking to someone rather than sending a text message.
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 12:29 GMT Timbo
Free calls ?
Are free local calls still the "norm" in USA?
If so, why not allow any UK payphone/phone booth to offer this, maybe with a time limit per call of say 5-10 minutes. This would help anyone who has run out of credit on their PAYG mobile or if your battery is dead.
One could even put in some USB charging ports too - maybe on a 10 minute timer (to prevent mis-use) as a public service?
And while they are making a call, or charging their phone, they can show a nice advert or two?
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 17:35 GMT Timbo
Re: Free calls ?
Quite...and it was clearly obvious from the article that this is the case.
(And another reg reader has made the point I was going to make).
However, the question remains: are landline calls in USA still free to local numbers. And if so, do they have a similar drug problem due to this?
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 22:58 GMT Rich 11
Re: F*ck.
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Thursday 19th December 2019 00:01 GMT sbt
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Thursday 19th December 2019 10:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 14:35 GMT tiggity
non existent problem
If short free calls used for drug calls then police can work with kiosk providers and get tp find dealers mobiles (and then locate them via phone location) - a lot of intelligence work done for them.
Should be treated as opportunity by police instead of as a problem
.. Though if weed were legal then a lot of those calls would stop, and even better, police intel would be further focused on "hard" drugs such as smack & crack.
If kiosks shut then drug buyers will just get burner phones or SIMS and dealing will need a lot more police effort to locate.
FFS why throw away drug dealing intel that is useful?
Obviously that would mean risk of being caught for certain dealers who give a few police sources the occasional brown envelope to stay in business, maybe pressure from those bent plod causing branding of this as a problem?
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Wednesday 18th December 2019 23:07 GMT ozreg
These were never "phone booths", but were an end-run around planning laws to get more advertising shoved in front of our eyeballs. The sooner they're gone the better, as which idiot thought that animated adverts on bright LCD screens next to roads (where people *SHOULD* be looking whilst driving, instead of at the advert) won't cause crashes?!?
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