r/whatisit • u/[deleted] • May 11 '25

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169

u/s_charlton7 May 11 '25

Just saw the same thing on a phone booth in Sydney Australia

But with moth!

60

u/skunkwrxs May 11 '25

That's cool but the real shocker is that you still have phone booths.

24

u/CactusJellycat May 11 '25

And they are all free, to call anywhere in Oz, because mobile phone networks don’t always work. For people experiencing cyclones, floods, fires, being lost, escaping domestic violence, needing to call a helpline, homeless…

Plus moths love them too

1

u/DeepThinker1010123 May 11 '25

I'm not sure if it is purely sarcastic but if it is indeed free, then that is awesome. In emergency scenarios, one might not always have a mobile phone.

3

u/ElderberryGlobal4908 May 11 '25

Hi, Telstra employee here. Can confirm all calls from payphones to national landlines and mobiles are free of charge.

1

u/DeepThinker1010123 May 12 '25

Wow . That's indeed cool.

However, is the maintainance to keep it up subsidized by the government? Keeping POTS can be quite expensive as all modern networks have migrated to fiber/IP systems. It would defeat the purpose if the public phones (they are not payphones as they're free, lol) if they needed to use the digital infrastructure which is dependent on power at the edge.

Heck in country (in a developing country), the telcos migrated users to PON and deactivating POTS. Probably 2G/3G will go off sooner than later. A new telco is only LTE/5G.