Reply to the comment made at this link:
http://www.sydenham.org.uk/news_phone_box.html
Spectrum Interactive (NWP Spectrum) purchased 1,000 kiosks from Interphone Public Networks limited on 19th August 2004. Spectrum replaced the 1,000 kiosks with 750 new kiosks are has nearly finished the refurbishment process. 372 kiosks have been made redundant across the UK whilst 187 still remain with the parent company of interphone which is Infolines Public Networks trading as 4 Kiosk Solutions. The kiosks owned by them are in the midlands and a few northern cities.
Spectrum Interactive has operated street payphones since 1996 across the UK and has been proven to offer the very best payphone service compared to BT. Spectrum Interactive has spent £2 Million of its own money onto buying these kiosks and refurbishing them.
Furthermore, someone made a comment about it being an obstruction to the path. Well, it would cost too much money too move and the council may not allow it and could take months. In fact it would mean digging up the path to install new electrical and BT line in. And the telephone box must be near a BT line otherwise it will not be possible to move the telephone box to another location.
Spectrum Interactive has proven that there is still money to be made from payphones and it is very unlikely that these kiosks will fall into a terrible state.
The reason as to why the interphone kiosks went into a bad state:
IPM Communications purchased nearly all of Mercury's(Cable and Wireless's) kiosks in 1995 and replaced all of the kiosks with their very own kiosks and payphones which costed £13 Million. They finished all installations by 1997 with the last new locational sites being created near Oxford Street in 1999. They installed too many kiosks and did very little market research when aquring UK payphone companies, they operated most kiosks in 2's which was very unprofitable, and then came a time when international phone card use thrived and could only be done by an 0800 access number. Thats when they started losing money, most people tried to call 0800 numbers from their payphones and they couldn't because IPM barred it on at least 500 payphones, this was because they were unable to claim any revenue (Payphone access charge) for when people called freephone numbers, this was because most of the interphone payphones were connected to old Mercury lines and Cable company telephone lines and it was not possible to claim the payphone access charge.
Therefore, they were losing even more money when the voa raised business rates and therefore stopped maintaining the kiosks. IPM Group in italy sold the UK branch to Infolines/Premier and became 'Infolines public networks', premier then failed to maintain them and just sold 'Infolines public Networks' on again. This is why there has been so much under investment on the company.