That sounds alarming, but from reading more about it, it doesn't seem like it would be relevant to this, although in the long run it's certainly possible that calling from a payphone would never actually reach someone directly, being shunted to the "you probably don't care about this" purgatory voicemail.

https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2776/2025-1...

But that would seem true today as well.

Why? Payphones have never been distinguished by the fact that you had to pay to use them. You also had to pay for the phone in your home.

Payphones were distinguished by the fact that they were located in convenient public places, and if you needed to contact someone, you could use them. That's still true here.

You could use a pay phone to call the operator. You can use it to make collect calls. Hell, if you were industrious enough, you could trick the phone into giving you a dial tone for free. The VoIP ones will probably be harder to trick though

Look at the device in TFA. That's a pay phone, which is also a way of describing a specific range of hardware types.