At its peak, the Bundespost operates more than 160,000 telephone booths in Germany. But with the triumph of mobile phones, the benefits are steadily declining. Telekom therefore wants to dismantle the last telephones by 2025.
Deutsche Telekom will switch off the last telephone booths in Germany at the beginning of 2023. As reported by “Stern”, among other things, the group informed cities and municipalities about the shutdown plans in a letter during the week. Accordingly, the coin service will be discontinued on November 21st. With a telephone card, calls should still be possible until the end of January.
According to this, around 12,000 public telephone booths are still in operation. Dismantling of the phones is scheduled to begin in February and last until early 2025. According to the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", Telekom wants to use the newly gained space to improve the mobile phone network: Small cells are to be built at around a quarter of the locations, i.e. small antennas that amplify mobile phone signals.
The step is justified with the lack of use of the telephone. "If almost everyone has a mobile phone in their pocket, there is little point in maintaining expensive public infrastructure," the FAZ quoted a spokesman for the German Association of Towns and Municipalities as saying. "Almost every third public telephone didn't make a single euro in sales last year," says a company spokesman for the newspaper. In addition to operating costs, stand rental and cleaning, there are always costs for repairing damage caused by vandalism and theft.
The development had already been indicated in recent years. In 2019 there were still almost 17,000 telephone booths on the network, in January 2022 the number was only 14,200 - a decrease of almost 16 percent.
Nevertheless, Telekom had declared at the beginning of this year that a complete dismantling was "currently not planned". Rather, locations where there is a corresponding demand could continue to be operated, the IT portal Golem had reported. These included places with a lot of public traffic such as airports, train stations and shopping streets.
The first telephone booth was set up in Berlin on January 12, 1881. From the 1920s, the yellow houses were part of the streetscape throughout Germany. At peak times, more than 160,000 were in service, first operated by the Bundespost and after reunification and privatization by Telekom.
