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Home >> Shanghai >> Article
Manned telephone booths soon to be a city memory
By:Zheng Qian  |  From:english.eastday.com  |  2018-07-17 18:37

Manned telephone booths are expected to leave the stage in Shanghai in two years, with unmanned ones retained for emergency communications, according to Shanghai Telecom Co., Ltd.

As a kind of public telephone, manned telephone booths, which have mainly served urban residents, experienced a rapid development period since they were first adopted in 1952. By the end of 2000, the city has a total of nearly 4,000 manned phone service stations with 12,000 telephones. However, with the modern popularity of home telephones and mobile communications, public phones have lost their value.

Staff of Shanghai Telecom said that manned telephones are currently mostly used by the floating population in the city or the elderly who have no mobile phone or are not used to using it, or by people when their mobile phones break down.

Most of the public phone facilities in Shanghai have been in service for more than 10 years. What’s worse, due to the shrinking of the public telephone business, the whole industry chain has been interrupted, with the supply of terminal parts and repair service staff in shortage.

In addition, with the trend of optical fibre replacing copper cable, public telephones which have adopted the latter will face many challenges in business maintenance.

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