Telstra old-school payphones are helping people short on change or looking for free WiFi

Remember those old Telstra phone booths you used to notice all around your suburb and particularly in the city? The ones you’d pop into occasionally, in the 1980s and early ’90s at least, to make a call to your Mum that you’ll be late for dinner, or your partner to find out the address for that date. Well, while we’ve all been busy glued to our mobile phones, you may not have noticed that there’s still quite a few of these booths peppered across Australia, making for great backup should your cell phone’s battery suddenly die. And it seems lots of people are still using them.

Telstra has reported their free payphone booths have generated a whopping 25.8 million calls so far this year, with consumers also taking advantage of the free WiFi services available at these booths.

On the WiFi front, some 133.4 terabytes of data was downloaded, this amount recorded end of June 2024 (see graphic at end of article). That’s the equivalent of streaming five years worth of 4K video, or watching 100 years worth of TikTok videos.

Who’d have thunk it? Indeed, I was just driving past one of those Telstra phone booths the other day and was wondering to myself if they ever got used by the public.

Locations of the most popularly used payphones have also been revealed, with Northern Territory destinations Palmerston and Casuarina stealing the top spots, closely followed by Sydney’s Mount Druitt, hinting that these payphones are of good assistance to folks finding themselves short of cash.

A payphone with Wi-Fi might not make sense to those with a lot of data up their sleeves, but to those without much connectivity, free Wi-Fi at these payphones is an essential support.

You could say that Telstra have set an example of excellent upcycling – polishing up old phone booths and equipping these for better modern use.

Phone booths have turned out to be communication saviours in times of trouble. In 2020, for example, there were constant queues at booths in Narooma, following bushfire devastation that hit the New South Wales town.

Narooma locals making the most of free payphone use during troubled times.

The news of the recent increase in phonebooth and WiFi usage comes as Telstra welcomes the three-year anniversary of making its payphones free, and two-year anniversary of making free WiFi available at these payphones. Of course you’d probably guess correctly that much of this increase has to do with the current high cost of living, seeing people turn to payphones when unable to pay their own phone bills, but at least Telstra are helping out in some way.

On that note, Maroon 5 might well want to change the lyrics to their song Payphone to: “I’m at a payphone, trying to call home; none of my change I spent on you.”

Antonino Tati