How GoodPhone Project brings free pay phones to Rochester

There were more than two million pay phones across the U.S. in 2000. By 2016, that number had dwindled to around 100,000 and past that, the FCC stopped keeping count.

Just because traditional pay phones have been disappearing, doesn’t mean that the need for public phone access is gone. Ninety-eight percent of Americans own a cellphone these days, but that also means that about 2% don’t.

Eric Kunsman is a photography professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, and leader of the GoodPhone Project, an effort to upcycle old pay phones to make them free to use for community members. He joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about where the idea came from and how the Rochester area is responding. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

Kai Ryssdal: Tell me about the GoodPhone Project, would you? What does it do? What do you guys do?  

Eric Kunsman: So the GoodPhone Project is — we're upcycling pay phones that we've acquired over the years, and we're providing free phone calls for people, up to 20 minutes free, unless it's social services. We really looked at the Rochester demographic, and that's where we're providing those calls. Frontier Communications has ripped out all their pay phones nationwide, but especially here in Rochester.

Ryssdal: Who are your clientele? Who's using these phones?

Kunsman: Right now, where we primarily place them are — we call them partners, because whether it's a homeless shelter, or our county libraries have reached out because they were having so many people using their front desk phones, [saying] we need to get people away from the front desk. It's not private. Sometimes it's a distraction. Really partnering with just different groups, because they pretty much provide the electric and the internet, because the phones are actually all voice-over IP, and that's where we're converting them, and that's how we can make them free.

Ryssdal: This whole project, though, the infrastructure, such as it is, is not free, right? There are some carrying costs for you and the group. 

Kunsman: We basically are acquiring pay phones. And believe it or not, the cost has gone up by about $120 over the past year.

Ryssdal: Really? For old payphones?

Kunsman: They went from $250 to about $370 because people are apparently installing them in their homes. Now they're becoming a fad. But then we have a monthly fee that we're paying for the voice-over IP service. We have voicemail service that people can set up voicemail-boxes. That way, if they're applying for a job or they give their extension to their loved one, they can retrieve that across the entire network also.

Ryssdal: Right, so it's a social services thing. With all respect, I ask this question. You are a photographer. What do you know about running a social services agency?

Kunsman: I don't. The reason why this happened was, as you said, I'm a photographer. I teach photography at RIT and printing. I own a business, and when I relocated to the JOSANA neighborhood, by our minor league baseball stadium, a lot of people, there was a knee jerk reaction, like, “Why would you move there? It's scary there. It's a war zone.” But that's where I got to know, you know, the families that live there, and it's not crime. If you look at the previous census data, when I moved in 2017, it's really about poverty. So then I started photographing the pay phones. At first, just trying to figure out why were people labeling this area? And then I was taught a lesson that people were still using the phones in 2018. So that's where, once I heard Frontier was going to rip them out nationwide, I was like, “I teach at an engineering school. There has to be a way we can do this.” And I have team members. The five of us are kind of a hodgepodge group, and we're just trying to do good for the community at this time. 

Ryssdal: In an ideal world, your project gets taken over by a social services group that actually has infrastructure and staff and funding, right? That's the future — I imagine — that you're hoping for.

Kunsman: That, or even whether it can be county or city government. Because if I'm still doing this in five years, then I believe we failed because the average phone is being used 400 times a month. And so with that in mind, we're hoping somebody will take it over. Right now, we're completely grant based or donations at this point. And we've had, since our last ribbon cutting, we've been getting a lot of inquiries from the Buffalo, New York Public Libraries, people from all over the country saying, “How do we get this in our community?” We’re trying to lay out, “Here's the a la carte, this is what it costs to buy a phone, these are the people you need,” and so forth.