#Bluey payphones

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Telephony 2/?

Phone Boxes/Booths

Thanks to @leprecon98 for some comments that got the ball rolling on this one.

In “Explorers”, you can see a distinctive Telstra phone box/booth next to the rural petrol station. You can always spot them by their distinctive roofs.

There’s also two downtown near the escalator into the department store in “Quiet Game”.

There are approximately 15,000 pay phones in Australia. There used to be double this before cell phones became commonplace.

As of August 2021, pay phones are free to use; they’re considered an emergency service, like for use during natural disasters.

Many of these pay phones are being converted to incorporate wifi access points because fewer people use phone booths nowadays. The wifi is going to be free too.

I don’t know how well-loved Telstra is as a company but as a non-Australian, this seems really impressive…

There’s actually a law requiring these services to be supplied throughout Australia. It must be expensive to keep all this equipment in service.

https://www.acma.gov.au/rules-telstra-payphones

Pay phones are increasingly very uncommon in North America these days. Here’s one I saw last year in Manitoba.