A column about curious stories from the worlds of science, technology, and film. Today — about how, in a country where everyone has a smartphone, twelve thousand payphones are officially still alive; why you can’t just switch them off; and how one paragraph in a federal law has outlived the entire stack it was written for.
It began with a single line on Rostelecom’s website: 12 335 universal payphones in 12 044 localities. I read the number twice. Twelve thousand is not “a couple of units at the train station for nostalgia.” It is a nationwide network of twelve thousand nodes — the scale of a mid-sized regional operator. Calls from them — to landlines, mobiles, emergency services — are free. They can receive calls too: each unit has its own number.
The engineering reaction is: “Well, legacy. It’s limping along.” But reality counters that: the network is not merely alive, it is required to be alive. Not by provider inertia, but by a direct provision of Article 57 of the federal law “On Communications”: every settlement must have at least one collective access facility, within no more than an hour’s walk. A payphone here is not a machine but a legal requirement. On foot, please.
To understand how unplanned eternity gets inherited, we need to untangle three knots: the legal one (who owes what), the engineering one (what is actually out in the field), and the economic one (who pays for it).
The wording of Article 57 is pure declarative code, with execution handed off to the minister:
the time during which a user of communications services reaches a collective access facility for the provision of telephone services without using a vehicle must not exceed one hour;
in every settlement, at least one collective access facility must be installed for the provision of telephone services with free access to emergency response services ensured...
In the version of 07.04.2020 (Law No. 110-FZ — the same reform that also launched Wi-Fi points and mobile communications points in villages), the list of universal services looks like this: telephone service through collective access facilities, meaning “payphones, multifunction devices, information kiosks (infomats), and similar devices”; data transmission and internet access through access points; mobile radiotelephone service through access points. Notice this: nobody removed payphones. They merely added them to the same company as infomats.
There is only one executor of these obligations — under the law, Rostelecom acts as the single universal service operator. The key verb in this story is not “installs,” but “is obliged”: the state simply forbade someone from stopping.
The dismantling of units became part of the reform’s technical brief: Shadayev, then communications minister, announced the April 2021 campaign — “we will have to stop operating payphones where they are currently not in demand. This will free up resources for accelerated construction of modern 4G base stations.” ComNews put it more bluntly at the time: by the end of the year, Rostelecom would decommission all payphones in settlements with populations of 1000 or more, and in smaller villages — those where traffic in 2020 was under a minute per month. Appreciate the architecture of the dismantling: not “remove the network,” but “cut the nodes where traffic ≈ 0.” Classic garbage collection, not DROP TABLE.
The quotas reached the regions like orders: Vladimir Oblast, where 2 318 village payphones had been operating a couple of years earlier, was allowed to keep 100. By April 2022, the branch reported: “the dismantling process has been completed.” Moscow buried its street network back in 2021. And yet 12 335 units survived both the reform and the tender for survival. The question is — why?
The story began not in 2003, but earlier, in 1993: when an operator received a local telephone-service license, it was required to install payphones equal to 0.5% of its installed capacity. Compliance was checked by that same inspectorate from which Roskomnadzor later grew. Sergey Yefimov of the Association of Telephone Service Operators recalls the math of the time: 29 million telephones across the country, telephone density of 19 units per 100 residents — payphones were not romance, but compensation for scarcity.
The absolute record was held by Moscow in 1991: almost 34 thousand units. After that, home phones completely beat payphones, but in 2003 the legislator made a move that survives to this day: payphones were written into federal law as part of universal service, and funding was secured through a reserve — contributions from all telecom operators. According to the ATOS estimate, “148 thousand payphones appeared in the country” under this package. Do the math: 8% of that peak remain alive today.
The other side of the coin is visible in the economics. The universal service reserve is formed from operator contributions amounting to 1,2% of communications-service revenue — it consolidates roughly 14 billion rubles a year. By 2020, the Finance Ministry considered this arrangement sufficient reason to propose cutting spending in half: Siluanov’s letter of July 20, 2020 proposed savings on payphones and Wi-Fi points in 2021–2023. The peak of the fight over this money coincided with pandemic statistics: in spring 2020, residents isolating at their dachas generated record traffic on village payphones — in Vladimir Oblast, local outlets wrote, more than 50,000 calls in six months. The network they were writing off suddenly became useful to someone again.
Then comes what I love about stories like this: the discrepancy between the registry and reality. The author of a Habr post did what any self-respecting engineer would do — downloaded the PDF payphone registry from the official portal, parsed it with pdf.js using an empirical Y_TOLERANCE = 3.5 to merge lines, and got a regional ranking: Tatarstan — 885 entries, Perm Krai — 605, Sverdlovsk Oblast — 499, Tver Oblast — 445. He honestly clarifies: these are registry lines, not a guarantee that you can get through. A registry is a data snapshot, not an SLA.
Public attitudes toward this network are visible in the dismantling quotas: they cut first where traffic had dwindled to mere minutes per unit. Vladimir Oblast is an example of the reform’s operational logic: 2 318 → 100, all according to plan. Residents’ reviews, meanwhile, are telling: the units turned out to be broken, and complaints were spreading across the regions as early as 2020. The network is alive not because every node in it works, but because the law carrying it is alive.
And then 2026 happened. Igor Antropenko of United Russia, a member of the State Duma Committee on Industry and Trade, voiced the idea that “the issue of reviving payphones has become acutely necessary, but now with internet access — so that citizens can remain connected even during shutdowns.” The rationale: mobile internet shutdowns in the regions; in Moscow, he said, those shutdowns “are perceived more acutely, since many administrative centers are located here.” A funny moment for reflection: to begin this “revival,” they first had to explain that internet-equipped booths are not retro, but a backup communications channel. A public wired network, physically independent of cellular coverage, is a classic fallback channel — only now they are reinventing it in the State Duma.
Twelve thousand payphones in 2026 are not a monument to the analog era. This is a case where telecom infrastructure was duplicated by law, and is therefore still alive: until Article 57 of “On Communications” is removed from the code and the list of universal services is rewritten (and it has only been expanded — 110-FZ in 2020 gave Wi-Fi points the status of a legal requirement), the network remains mandatory. The operator, with billions of rubles flowing every year through the reserve to maintain this network, is hostage to its own role as the guarantor of communications for places the market could not reach.
And therein lies the lesson for those who design systems: a component born of law does not die when it loses its usefulness (in 2005), or when it loses its economic rationale (in 2015), but when it ceases to be someone’s legal obligation. While dismantling proceeds by quota, the station remains alive; while Article 57 remains untouched, the network holds.
And finally — one small detail that made the digging worthwhile: in 2020, Rostelecom made calls from payphones free not out of generosity, but on government instructions. And now that free service is legitimately indefinite: the payphone user calls for free, while operators pay for it out of the reserve — 1,2% of revenue every year, including those reading this text on a phone through the cellular network built “instead of payphones.”
Sources: Article 57 of the Federal Law “On Communications” (version 110-FZ of 07.04.2020) — ConsultantPlus; the April 2021 universal-service reform and Shadayev’s agenda — ComNews; universal-service reserve economics and the Finance Ministry letter — Kommersant; the 2020–2021 dismantling campaign in Vladimir Oblast — Zebra TV; the PDF registry and parsing — Habr; ATOS’s position and the figure of 148 000 — ComNews; the idea of “payphones with internet” in 2026 — TASS/Meduza.