List the uses you have for a phone booth, keeping in mind that affordable apps for your mobile device like Burner can provide you with the same kind of privacy while offering you more features than a coin operated public phone. Advances in communications technologies have made the one-time staple of urban landscape all but useless, until now.


In Boston, DAS Communications, RCN Business Services, LCC International (News - Alert), and Pacific Telemanagement Services have formed a partnership that will make phone booths relevant again in two parts of the city, with hopes for more locations in the future. The service is called FreeBostonWiFi, and it is exactly what it sounds like.

The partnership aims to turn phone booths into Wi-Fi access points for residents and visitors who connect to the “FreeBostonWiFi” SSID. Each company brings its own special expertise to the table. In essence, it breaks down to this: DAS’s small cell technology using RCM’s fiber-feed provided bandwidth is being applied to existing city infrastructure with LCC’s expertise in deploying this kind of solution.

(image via http://www.geekologie.com)

Small Cells have already been aiding in the war against “spectrum-crunch,” which has been a worry for years as the growing demand for mobile data has been competing with other airborne services, and public Wi-Fi has always been a part of their planned application. Despite the low range of the cells, they are low energy and offer the same bandwidth capabilities as the other networks. Offering this service won’t only make life more convenient for the Bostonians, but it can also provide relief to the macro-cell networks as the demand for video services grows. This is ideal for situations such as large media events like the Super Bowl or the Presidential Inauguration.

The resurrection of the Boston phone booth for purposes of mobile communications is novel, and this recent strategic alliance represents this. Vice president of Advanced Mobility Solutions at LCC, E.J. von Schaumburg, admits: “It's interesting and a little ironic that capacity demands from the cellular market has allowed for the repurposing of existing phone infrastructure, like payphone kiosks.”

But it’s no surprise that the infrastructure provided by a pre-existing phone network is ideal for hosting this type of solution. The phone kiosks, by design, are meant to be placed in convenient locations for human access.