Telephone booth service will be terminated in Germany after 142 years of operation

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen OC_Formula for clue delivery! CTOnews.com Nov. 22 Deutsche Telekom announced today that after 142 years of operation, the country's telephone booths will end service. There are currently 12000 phone booths in operation in Germany, but after today, the company will discontinue the coin payment system and people will only be able to use it with phone cards.

By the end of January 2023, phone cards will also not be able to use phone booths. But Deutsche Telekom won't dismantle the last phone booth until at least 2025. In addition, the company said it would leave behind about 3000 phone booths that would be retrofitted into small base stations with small antennas to expand mobile network coverage.

The company decided to take the move because Germany's Telekommunikationsgesetzes of 2021 ended the mandate to operate public telephones. That's because most people now have cell phones, which are obviously more convenient for emergency calls.

In 1881, Germany's first so-called "telephone booth"(Fernsprechkiosk) opened in Berlin. In subsequent years, the Federal Postal Service, which existed between 1947 and 1994, managed these phone booths, which at the time had a very distinctive yellow appearance.

CTOnews.com learned that phone booths reached their peak of popularity in Germany in the mid-1990s, when they could be seen at stations, residential areas and even on the edge of forests. Deutsche Telekom later took over the telephone booths from the Bundespost, which had a total of 160,000 telephone booths.

Old yellow telephone booths in Germany, despite their long history, are now hard to find. There is interest in older phone booths, including some museums, and abandoned and used German phone booths can be purchased from Deutsche Telekom for about 500 euros.