No More Payphones

SAN ANTONIO (AP) - So, when was the last time you used a pay phone? Chances are, not recently, with the use of cell phones becoming almost universal.

So it should come as no surprise that AT&T has decided to pull the plug on its rapidly shrinking pay phone business. It says it plans to be out of the pay phone business by the end of next year, before it starts losing money on the deal. An AT&T spokesman says the company will sell 65,000 pay phones in prisons and in public places and remove those that aren't sold to new owners. Pay phones represent only a tiny portion of the business of the company that has more than 67 million wireless subscribers.

The pool of pay phones nationwide has shrunk from 2.6 million to 1 million in the last decade.