In Rochester, pay phones are working again—and they’re free

Two years ago, the last pay phones were disconnected in Rochester, New York. But a group of volunteers has started bringing a handful of phones back—and making them free to use.

Called the GoodPhone Project, the effort is aimed at people who still don’t have reliable access to a mobile phone, including those experiencing homelessness. As pay phones have disappeared, alternatives have been hard to come by.

“A lot of community centers, and especially the Monroe County libraries, were being inundated with people asking to use their front desk phones,” says Eric Kunsman, one of the volunteers behind the project.

There’s a clear need: The handful of phones that the GoodPhone Project has installed each get hundreds of uses per month. Around 20% of the calls go to social services. (Calls have a 20-minute limit unless they’re made to social service organizations, since that often involves a long wait on hold.)

The upcycled phones use voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology and allow users to set up their own voicemail extensions, so it’s possible to use the number when they apply for a job.

Kunsman, a photographer who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology, spent years photographing pay phones in the area as they were slowly taken away. He soon realized that despite seeming like relics, the phones were still in use. He partnered with colleagues Rebekah Walker, a digital librarian, and researcher Janelle Duda-Banwar to map out the phones’ locations. The last phones to survive were in the poorest areas.

When the Frontier phone company removed the last phones, the group decided to do something. They found a Los Angeles-based company that still installs pay phones, called Littlejohn Communications, and converted old phones to add VoIP and make it clear that they’re free to use. Six have been installed so far, all in neighborhoods that had the most need. One of the phones is solar-powered, since it’s in a location that didn’t have access to electricity.

The project is relatively inexpensive. An old pay phone costs around $350. (Kunsman tried to acquire Frontier’s old phones in Rochester before they were scrapped, but didn’t succeed.) The digital device to convert it costs $50, and operations cost around $40 per month. Kunsman has also received some donations of equipment, and says he currently has around 200 old pay phones sitting in front of his photography studio.

He hopes that the city or county can take over the project as a public service and expand it. “I’m a photographer,” Kunsman says. “If I’m still doing this in five years, we failed in some way.”

Previously there were around 1,400 pay phones in Rochester. Roughly 20 years ago, there were 2 million nationally; by 2016, that number had dropped to 100,000. At that point, the Federal Communications Commission stopped tracking the number that were left.

Kunsman wants to make a guide for other communities that want to replicate the process. Since December, he says he’s heard from groups in seven other cities that recognized a similar need. “If a photographer, a social sciences librarian, and others can do this, it’s actually a lot easier than it seems,” he says. “You just need to have the time.”

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