Smart-phone booths

Phone booths and phone banks, relics from a pre-cellular day, may be set for a come-back. We’ve all walked by the vacated spaces where banks of pay phones used to be affixed to walls in airports and hotels, as well as the stands on busy street corners.

Obviously phone booths are connected via the two wires needed for a POTS line which could easily be augmented with a DSL session.  Along with power, the locations can easily be re-born to a ‘smartphone’ world.  Maybe we can dub these “smartphone booths”. 

(Ed note:  That is *not* me walking shirtless in this photo...)

Putting Wi-Fi access points into un-used phone banks makes some sense, particularly with the new Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) and HotSpot2.0 initiatives.  Acompany can use their right-of-way to install and maintain the access points while changing back-end service providers (Boingo, iPass, AT&T, …) to enable their subscriber’s access.