no payphone service to speak of. Norway The last functioning phone box in Norway was taken out of service in June 2016. However, 100 of the phone boxes have been preserved around the country and are protected under cultural heritage laws. Sweden The first telephone booth in Sweden was erected in 1890. In 1981 there were 44,000 of them, but in 2013, there were only 1,200, with a withdrawal of the last one in 2015. A survey showed that in 2013, only 1% of the population in Sweden used one the previous year. United Kingdom The red telephone kiosk is recognised as a British icon and the BT Group still hold intellectual property rights in the designs of many of the telephone boxes, including registered trade mark rights. BT is steadily removing public telephone kiosks from the streets of the UK. It is permitted to remove a kiosk without consultation provided that there is another kiosk within walking distance. In other cases, it is required to comply with Ofcom rules in consultation with the local authority. Some decommissioned red telephone boxes have been converted for other uses with the permission of BT Group, such as housing small community libraries or automated external defibrillators. United States In 1999, there were approximately 2 million phone booths in the United States. Only 5% of those remained in service by 2018. About a fifth of America's 100,000 remaining pay phones are in New York, according to the FCC. However, only 4 phone booths remain in New York City, all on Manhattan's Upper West Side; the rest have been converted into WiFi hotspots. Incoming calls are no longer available, and outgoing calls are now free. In February 2020, the city confirmed that despite a plan to remove dozens of pay phones, the iconic booths would continue to be maintained. Smoking ban Following the commencement of the smoking ban in England in 2007, it became illegal to smoke in red telephone boxes (types K2 to K8), due to these boxes being completely enclosed spaces. The smoking ban requires owners to display no smoking signs, which has resulted in BT displaying a "no smoking" sticker which refer to the telephone box as "premises". Despite smoking in red telephone boxes being banned, smoking in other telephone boxes remains legal as these boxes are not completely enclosed spaces. Advertising Many telephone boxes in the United Kingdom have become locations