From today the era of telephone booths ends, once a point of reference for communicating from outside the home. The Communications Regulatory Authority (AGCOM) he has deliberate is Tim is no longer obliged to guarantee the public service and can now start dismantling the approximately 30 workstations in the area. 16 thousand public workstations. By now supplanted by mobile phones, the use of telephone booths had drastically decreased. Agcom took this decision after one public consultation which has found broad consensus among operators in the sector.
Gradual dismantling
The Agcom resolution provides that the dismantling process of the 35.994 workstations public telephony either gradual. The annual removal plan will be divided into no more than four lots. The process is part of the implementation of European directive 2018/1972 which plans to modernize telecommunications within the European Union. Also today, the 99,2% of workstations are covered by a network of TIM mobile telephony in 2G/4G/5G technology. Before demolishing the cabin, Tim will have to verify that the area is undercover. Isolation occurs when the area is not reached by one or more mobile operator networks (Tim, Vodafone, WindTre, Iliad and others). Only in that case should the demolition of the cabin be suspended. At that point, AgCom will authorize or deny the demolition, within 60 days of reporting these peculiar cases. This transition will free up public space and reduce costs associated with maintaining and maintaining phone booths.
The cabins remain in hospitals, prisons and barracks
Not all phone booths will be eliminated. Agcom has established that some cabins, those still present in the hospitals (from at least 10 beds), in the prisons and in some barracks (with at least 50 permanent occupants), will continue to fulfill an essential social function. These posts they will remain active to enable patients, detainees and military personnel to communicate with the outside world. In these places there are approx 1.801 stations.
Also, phone booths will be kept in places where mobile network coverage is not yet available, such as in the mountain huts (470 posts). These remote areas may not be able to receive mobile network signals, making phone booths the only reliable means of communication in such contexts.
Phone booths: a steady decline in use over the years
Tim, the resolution reads, already in the period from 2001 to 2008 recorded a reduction of about 88% in terms of total number of conversations from a fixed location (understood as the sum of local, international, inter-district and fixed-mobile traffic) and a reduction of approximately 90% in terms of minutes of conversation. From 2019 to 2021, the annual number of calls per station decreased by approximately 57%, going from 277 calls to 118 calls. Even emergency calls to 112 are practically nil: in 2021 there were 3 calls (-25% compared to the previous year).
From a survey, led by SWG SpA., out of an overall sample of 1.358 interviewees (representative of the Italian population aged 14 to 74) during the period from 18 to 28 January 2019, it emerged that only 0,5% of the population had used the public telephone service in 90 days prior to the interview and that 12% of the population had never used it. Furthermore, over 80% of the population did not feel the need to use this service with three out of four people not even knowing where to look for a cab near their home.
