Phone service was spotty in Chambers before the two new nearby cell towers.

If you didn't have a landline -- or you were just rolling through Holt County on Highway 95 -- you'd have to search high and low, mostly high, for a signal.

"We had this one guest, he'd take his pickup and park on the hill and stand in the back to call his wife every night," said Nancy Winings, who runs a bed and breakfast. "It was so sweet."

The other option: the pay phone planted in the pavement outside the K & M Telephone Co.

But as cell service has grown stronger, shrinking the wide-open distances in rural northern Nebraska, demand for that roadside pay phone -- and others -- has faded.

And now, it's nearly dead.

The Chambers phone collected $3.35 in coins in all of last year.

"We used to have salesmen who'd use them," said Larry Woods, the phone company's general manager. "But there really isn't much need or much use of the pay stations."

So the company is asking the state Public Service Commission for a first: permission to get rid of that phone, and another it operates 25 minutes away in Inman.