Students who are used to simply walking down the hall of their dorm to use a public phone may have to search to find one.

Ron Kurdziel, director of telecommunications at Syracuse University, said Verizon is scheduled to remove 155 of the 195 public pay phones on campus starting in February and continuing into March. No phones have been removed yet..

With the wireless industry affecting the number of people who use public telephones, Verizon has not been making enough money to keep all of the public phones on campus, he added.

Cliff Lee, a Verizon spokesman, said it is important for a pay phone to pay for itself through customer use because of the maintenance costs that results from damage or vandalism needed to keep the phones operating.

Verizon receives no subsidies to have the phones on the university property to help offset their cost but has offered to allow the university to keep some of the phones at a monthly price, Kurdziel said. There is currently no money in the budget allocated to pay for the phones to stay in service, he said.

Lee said the removal of pay phones is done frequently, especially recently because people now rely on cell phones to make calls when they are out of their homes.

Verizon will sometimes remove some of the phones in an area if others are nearby to try to make one of the phones profitable, Lee said.

“This has been done throughout the country back to about two years. We are fortunate they have held on as long as they did,” Kurdziel said.

Kurdziel said Verizon worked with the university to make sure that every residence hall will have one pay phone, as well as a number of locations around campus that the Department of Public Safety pinpointed as needing a pay phone for safety purposes.

“This doesn’t mean that at some point farther down the road they won’t say the remaining phones aren’t creating enough revenue and remove some of them as well,” he said.

Jessie Price, a junior chemical engineering major, said the number of phones that are being taken away at one time is unfair.

“Pay phones are important even if you have a cell phone because cell phones die,” she said.

Published on February 4, 2003 at 12:00 pm