Soproni said the company assured him in April that although it did not plan to reduce the number of booths that still have working telephones, “it would at least dismantle those that were used mostly as pissoirs and bar counters in the absence of phone sets. For example, on Teréz körút and Podmaniczky utca.”



This apparently did not happen, as the mayor declared on his Facebook page on Tuesday that “we have had enough of their lack of action, so we decided to make it obvious to everybody that Magyar Telekom is responsible for the state of the booths, for the shame that is in the heart of Budapest, which can be seen by thousands of people every day.”



Soproni personally pasted posters on the phone booths on Teréz körút asking:
- “Do you also think this looks like a public WC? The company responsible for cleaning it is Telekom.”
- “If this booth were ours, we would be very ashamed. This booth belongs to Telekom.”
- “Do you know whose job it is to clean this booth? Telekom’s.”



Soproni said he has corresponded since 2021 with Magyar Telekom and the media authority NMHH so that “these indescribably ugly, dirty, mostly useless downtown telephone booths should disappear or at least they should be cleaned, but they never got around to that.”



The NMHH can decide how many telephone booths it is mandatory to maintain in a settlement. Such booths stand every 100 metres on Teréz körút, but Soproni argues that this number is entirely unjustified, regardless of the condition of the booths, as the telephones are used for 20 minutes a month, on average.