Is this like a communal phone? How is it monetized?

We had one phone at home which was the only phone in the village and the whole town could come over to make calls. We timed their calls with a stopwatch to calculate their fee.

One time, some people from the city came in, asking to use the telephone, but they warned us that they’ll be calling a cellphone and that it should be much much more expensive than calling a landline, but we didn’t know the rate for that, we didn’t even know what a cellphone was.

Beautiful photograph.