Last telephone boxes vanishing in Helsinki

In the 1990s there were 900, and a year ago there were still a couple of hundred of them, but they are going fast

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The last phone-boxes will vanish from Helsinki's streets within the next few days. On Wednesday, Harri Niemi and Jari Ronkonen, working for the Finnish teleoperator Elisa, were out removing the remaining kiosks from Helsinki’s Kallio and Alppila districts.
      Using a crane, the men lifted the kiosks onto the platform of a truck. The phones had earlier been removed from the boxes.
     
This year Elisa has still had some 50 kerbside public telephones in the capital city. However, as mobile phones have become more common, public payphones have no longer been used very much.
      Another telephone operator Telia-Sonera removed its last public telephones from Helsinki already in the spring of 2006.
      As recently as last year there were some 200 public phones in Helsinki, while in the 1990s the number was about 900.
      According to Communications Manager Maarit Kujala from Elisa, many companies or organisations still have public phones. For example in hospitals, patients usually have a phone in the room. In an emergency, however, it is likely that the nearest recourse will not be running to a phone box but using the cellphone of somebody who turns up at the scene.
      Elisa has received very few complaints about the removal of public phones, as almost every Finn has a mobile phone.
     
In recent years, the annual number of calls made from the public phones has been about half a million. This compares with the heyday of the public phone, when upwards of seven million calls a year were made from them.
     
Most of the phone-boxes that are retired from active service eventually end up being mixed with scrap metal for recycling. However, some kiosks have been converted into more exotic purposes: saunas, garden bars, or even rain shelters for outdoor shooting ranges.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Fond farewell to the phone-box? (8.4.2000)

Helsingin Sanomat