Brazilian telephone booths
When we arrived in Brazil, we saw these funny-looking contraptions all over the place. It didn't take us long to realize that these are public telephones. You never see fully-enclosed booths like we have in North America here, but they have hundreds of thousands of them here in Sao Paulo alone. In fact, they used to be much more common than phones in people's homes. Recently, with the increase in home phones and now the explosion of mobile phone use in Brazil, the telephone companies are finding that these phone booths aren't being used as often as before. In fact, one company reports that they will remove over 100,000 of these phone booths in Sao Paulo by the end of 2007. Apparently it costs more to maintain the booths than they are profiting. Don't worry, I think they said that there will still be about 300,000 of them left in the city, so people shouldn't have to go far to find a phone.
Cary Sawatsky posted this message at 1:24 p.m..
