Cellular Vs Public Pay Phones

Sao Paulo - Brazil’s largest city - may lose up to 90,000 public pay phones because of the increasing saturation of cell phones. However, the 90K number is only about 25% of the total public pay phones available in the city. While the final decision of how many phones to cut is up to the owner, Telefonica (or at least the Brazilian division), it’ll be partly prompted by a new government decree. The number of public phones has to be reduced from eight down to six for every 1000 people. [via Cellular News]

Well I haven’t come across any news that Sao Paulo is getting municipal Wi-Fi, but if and when that does happen, I assume that most public payphones numbers will likely be reduced further, or at least replaced with VoIP pay phones that run off a city’s Wi-Fi network.