The reminders of a telco past still standing today

By Craig Stephen

First Person - They are in many towns and suburbs but you'd be excused for not even noticing their existence.

Today, payphones are one of the most puzzling paradoxes of our time. Thousands of them exist around New Zealand but whether anyone actually uses them is a question that seems to pervade my mind just now.

With almost everyone, from primary age schoolchildren to tech-savvy pensioners, having a phone in their pocket, the demand isn't exactly what could be described as taxing. So, why are they still dotted around our high streets and residential areas?

I attempt to seek an answer in Kilbirnie, Wellington where there's a transparent box with green splashes on the side in the familiar Spark style.

It's actually two boxes in one, but the phone on the wall side has been removed; presumably due to economics rather a brazen theft. It is located on the main drag, close to the community centre, and there's a lot of foot traffic even on a Wednesday afternoon before the schools break out. If there's a need for a telephone box I reckon that it will be here, in the retail hub of the eastern and southern Wellington suburbs.

I soon have my suspicions confirmed: I could stand here most of the day and not find a single person actually using the payphone. Passersby do tell me that they haven't made a call from one for 15, 20, maybe more years.

Local man Dennis Clune tests it out and is surprised that it works and there's a dial tone. One lady asks if I need to use her cellphone and another shopper helpfully explains how to use the static phone. "You put the card in here and it'll tell you how much credit you have," he says. But no, he has no need of it, he has a mobile phone in his jacket.

I head to Newtown where there is a box close to the entrance to the city's zoo. This has bright pink splashes and it's hard to ignore this shiny monument.

It's a largely residential area so chances are someone might use it. A neighbour, John Angwin, who's lounge window looks onto the structure, has found a good use for it. "I use it for wifi. I stream a lot of stuff on Spotify and I get a gigabyte free a day with Spark, so why not."

Angwin can't recall the last time he saw anyone use the phone, not that he keeps an eye out for such activity. In fact, the last time he saw someone in the phone box was to protect themselves from the rain or just to hang around with a drink they've bought from the nearby dairy. His upstairs neighbours, who have an even clearer view of it, say the same, they've never seen it used for its proper purpose.

Nevertheless, as I'm about to leave, a schoolboy whips out his laptop and holds it up to the phone box to see if he can get a signal.

Thousands still in existence

If I'm to get an idea of who uses these boxes I need to go to the source. Spark has a page dedicated to telephone boxes on its website but it's been neglected and is woefully out of date.

I need to get a spokesperson to give me the lowdown, and they inform me that there's about 2000 payphones in New Zealand, from Te Kao in the Far North to Halfmoon Bay on Rakiura/Stewart Island. There are boxes in remote places like Manapouri, south of Te Anau, and Ruatoria on the East Coast.

You can use phone cards and a small number even accept coins. The ones with high-speed wifi, such as the one in Newtown, have a 50-metre radius of reception.

Spark say they can't determine who exactly are using phone booths, but the majority of phone calls are made to 0800 numbers. Toll calls are the second most common type of calls. These are calls that incur charges ranging from 50 cents to $18.60 per minute, depending on the type of call. Wait, how much a minute? Who are those calls to?

My imagination begins to wander about the nefarious activities that could take place in the cloak of anonymity the boxes apparently provide.

I envisage people making discreet calls to secret lovers with the luxury of it not being tracked on a cellphone, or a criminal making a deal. In fact, the latter notion isn't so fanciful.

In Nottingham, in England's Midlands, payphones were removed from one deprived area four years ago when it was reported that drug dealers were making hundreds, if not thousands, of calls through them every year.

Craig Young, the chief executive of the Telecommunications Users' Association (TUANZ), said they are used in emergencies, such as when people who have witnessed an accident or incident on the street and don't have a phone to hand. Or they might use them if the network coverage is poor in their area. Furthermore, there's the international calls using phone cards, which often offer cheap rates.

He said the large number of calls to 0800 numbers are because some government departments and businesses won't pay for an 0800 call from a mobile as it costs them. But these cost far less from payphones. TUANZ has been asking for restrictions on 0800 calls from cellphones to be lifted and Young said they'd had some success on that front.

"There's still quite a few payphones and they're providing a service. Spark has no obligation to retain these phones actually, they're being provided as a service by a commercial party. But we'd like them to stay as long as they can as they're an important part of the communications service. It's one of those things that you don't think about using it until you actually have to, and you're then thankful that there's one around."

The future looks bleak however with low usage, and if their days are nigh then it will be the end of more than a century of them being in New Zealand. The first ever phones were installed in 1910, a full 21 years after they first appeared in the United States. For most of this time the phones were bright red, just like the more famous ones that still exist in the United Kingdom.

Some of those boxes are still around, such as the much photographed one in Wellington's Post Office Square.

Felicity Wong, chair of Historic Places Wellington, said they were once common all over the capital. "It's long out of date technology from a pre-cell phone/wifi society. For anything other than in-person face-to-face talk, we needed to visit a small red room on a street corner, put money in a slot and be connected - by wires - to another person at a distance. No more wires means no more small red rooms. It's an amusing reminder of human progress."

Some boxes now reside in technology museums, or in people's properties as a memento.

While researching this I came across an unusual twin box with the bidding price at that point of almost $1000. In Britain the old red boxes have something of a reverence about them.

One company repairs and resells old ones for those nostalgic about them. They end up in gardens, residential homes, private houses and even a shopping mall in Dubai.

Wong said the Post Office Square box is a necessary reminder of the past and should be retained.

"Old buildings like this one with its distinctive design improve people's quality of life; they locate and ground us in society; in a particular place - our city; and in a specific time. They compliment new buildings and technology."

I'm reminded of my own experience of using them, in the UK, as a student in the mid-90s just before cellphone ownership took off. In the dark and cold (calls were cheaper after 6pm) I'd trudge to a phone box to call friends and family. They often stank of urine and were used by graffiti artists.

Some of the ones in London notoriously contained calling cards from sex workers. There could be a queue to use them, and if you had to, say, call the gas board to report a leak, well, you'd just to wait until the caller in the box finished telling their mother about how they'd played in the tennis finals that day.

Inevitably, the winds of change will claim the remaining 2000 boxes around the country. And Spark have indicated that the time may not be too far away.

"While we recognise phone booths still provide some value for some New Zealanders, as mobile services become increasingly popular and accessible this value is rapidly reducing every year - call volumes on the fixed-line phone booth network have dropped by nearly 70 percent over the last four years," a spokesperson told me.

"As we would with any of our products and services, we will need to consider their role in the future, however we haven't got anything further to share on that at this stage." The revenue garnered through the boxes was "immaterial" Spark added.

So don't expect something that you never notice anyway to hang around much longer.