ATHABASCA – Payphones just aren’t as miraculous, or convenient as they used to be, and they certainly don’t bring in the coins as rapidly as they once did.
Athabasca will see its last payphone uninstalled any day now after a recent notification to municipalities from WiMacTel, which is removing the public phones across the province for TELUS. The communication noted the payphones could disappear from their long-time moorings any time after January 24. The Village of Boyle received the same notice that its last payphone would be removed from Hooter’s gas station in the same time frame.
Athabasca town council initially asked for more information from the company and was curious about a possible replacement at a different location, but CAO Rachel Ramey reported at council’s March 15 meeting that after speaking with a Telus representative, that wasn’t likely.
“As people are aware, it can be difficult to get hold of anybody at Telus, but once we did, after several weeks, we were told that they are removing the phones because they're moving towards fibre lines rather than copper, and that the phones are unable to work with fibre. They also said that in the last three years specifically, that phone located there only made $52.85 and that doesn't even cover the cost of a technician to come collect the funds or service the phone,” said Ramey.
The current rate for a local phone call is 50 cents.
“It’s more than my phone made,” commented Coun. Sara Graling.
In 2013, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) put a moratorium on the removal of payphones in small communities, and in 2016 published a report finding 32 per cent of Canadians surveyed had used a payphone in the last year. The commission went on to call it a “vital service,” especially for the “economically and socially disadvantaged,” while recognizing that usage was continuing to plummet year after year.
In a recent e-mail to Great West Media, Telus spokesperson Chelsey Rajzer said payphone use has steadily declined over the last 20 years due to the popularity and availability of cellphones in Canada. Telus started removing payphones about six years ago as a result.
At the council meeting, Graling who went on to say it was a historic moment and urged her colleagues around the table to venture up to the Petro Canada on the east side of town to commemorate the end of an era with a photo after the meeting, which they did.
For Athabasca’s own renowned telephone collector and historian Harold Northcott, whose collection of telephones and telecom memorabilia throughout the years may very well be the largest in Canada, it certainly is the end of an era.
Northcott, now 77, took a job with the Newfoundland Phone Company as a young man, earning his certification as an engineering technologist and working for Bell Canada for a time before heading for Alberta’s oil patch. After retiring, he rediscovered his fascination with telephones and now has a collection well over 1,000, including dozens of payphones from times past.
That includes examples of the first payphones ever made, which were invented by William Gray in the last part of the 1800s, he shared in a phone conversation about phones on March 20.
The Gray phones look as one would imagine a late 19th Century telephone would look, with a bell-shaped handset on the side and a microphone built into the boxed body of the contraption. Gray’s success came when he added a bell that would chime to notify the operator that a coin had indeed been offered and the call could be connected. The payphone was born and proliferated for well over 125 years, and the rest is history as the last few hundred in Alberta are now permanently decommissioned.
- With files from Kevin Ma
