In November 2021, the Government of Spain approved the draft of the new General Telecommunications Law. With it came a unique measure: the definitive elimination of obsolete elements such as telephone booths and telephone directories. That object of pop culture has lost its meaning and is disappearing around the world — New York removed the last active recently— but there are those who want to rescue her (a little).
a cabin at home. Betrand Fan is an engineer who works on Slack, but is also passionate about phone booths. on your blog counted how you came up with the idea of installing one at home. Although there are companies that They are sold with the same idea, he preferred to buy an authentic one on eBay. After inspecting its interior, he managed to mount it on the wall with a panel especial -it wasn’t easy- and connect it to a coupler.
The cabin worked perfectly, but this engineer didn’t want his 5-year-old daughter to use it for good, so he discovered that there is a simulator of telephone lines that allowed him to connect that booth in his office with the landline telephone in his daughter’s room. Result? While her daughter is working, she suddenly calls him to tell him something that has happened to her dolls. “Most of the time, it’s a great interruption,” she says.
But the booths had an expiration date. In Spain, actions were initiated to eliminate them from the national territory at the end of 2018. At that time about 17,000 booths remained and most of them worked perfectly even if they were rarely used. They gave losses, but even so they managed to extend their life a little more and they resisted dying.
Cabins converted into Wi-Fi points. Their presence in cities and towns around the world made the cabins something as they seemed part of the urban landscape. This idea meant that instead of uninstalling them there were efforts to convert them into other types of solutions. Projects like the one in New York have been seen to turn them into wifi hotspotsbut also to adapt them and allow them to be USB chargersPoints of tourist information or even charging points for electric vehicles.
A neverending story. In Spain the phone booth was slow in coming. He did it in 1928, although that it was not a cabin as suchbut a pay telephone for public use installed in the booth of the then Vienna Park (today Florida Park) in the El Retiro park in Madrid.
The first cabin “cabin” in Spain was installed in 1963, and for several decades they became a fundamental part of our lives. Then smartphones came along and booths became irrelevant, but they’ve still survived for years. There are more fantastic stories about phone booths, like the one about the lonely phone booth that was installed in the middle of the Mojave desert in California. Perhaps the reality is that the phone booth they will never die.
