Payphones continued their slow march to obsolescence this spring when the federal telecom regulator concluded payphone lines are not an essential service in a country where most people own cellphones.

Citing the diminishing demand for payphones and the proliferation of wireless services, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission decided in April to discontinue a regulation that forced BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. to offer payphone lines at a lower price than regular business lines. It gave them one year to phase out the discount for smaller payphone operators.

This marks the end of a 20-year-old scheme to inject competition into the formerly monopolized payphone market. In 1998, the CRTC opened up the market. To give new entrants a chance, it mandated that Bell and Telus sell payphone lines to smaller competitors for 25 per cent less than business lines. At the time, the CRTC said this would “stimulate service innovation, foster a viable domestic industry and increase total market revenues.”

Fast-forward to 2018 and the notion of a competitive payphone market seems quaint given the advance of mobile phones. Wireless services now dominate the communications industry with 31 million wireless subscriptions in Canada, whereas the number of payphones plummeted to 57,542 in 2016 from 185,000 in 1998.