Originally Posted by
poisson
Back in the day, I remember having a phone at every seat. You could call someone and there was a little credit card swipe thing to pay. I associate these phones with the calls made by passengers and crew on 9/11. Were these mostly a novelty or was there another reason they were phased out?
They weren’t used very much by passengers — too costly for most and not used by most passengers — and became even less useful for consumers and more of a maintenance and carry cost burden for the airline+phone service providers as cell phones/blackberry/smartphones took off along with internet access on the ground and even in the air.