14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not just New York City that wants to turn its unused phone booths into Wi-Fi hot spots, but also Australia. It looks like Telstra’s payphone booths will be turned into a huge Wi-Fi hotspot network.
The Age reports that payphones have been suffering a slot death ever since mobile devices started becoming more and more popular in the past decade.
Out of the 40,000 booths that were operational five years ago, less than 30,000 were still working in 2013. Even those that are still out there are very rarely used at all.
Telstra has announced its plans to launch a trial of 1,000 new Wi-Fi hotspots in November. The booths are placed in Australia’s tourist hubs and they should come just in time for the Christmas wave of visitors.
The Wi-Fi hotspots will be available free of charge as the service is tested and it will work with both smartphones and tablets. It’s unclear whether Telstra wants to start charging Internet surfers sometime in the future, after the trial is over.
“The new hotspots will allow [Australians] to browse the internet, check emails or upload photos to social media when they are sitting at a café, shopping in retail stores, or waiting for the bus, train or tram in range of a hotspot,” Telstra said.
Phone booth Wi-Fi all over the country
The list of sites includes Bondi Beach in Sydney, Bourke Street Mall in Melbourne, Queen Street mall in Brisbane and the central business district in Perth. In order for users to get Internet access, they need to be within a 30 to 50 meters radius to the hotspot.
Back in May, Telstra announced a $100 million Wi-Fi hotspot network and this trial is part of this particular effort. Aside from the phone booths, the telco will build 8,000 of its own hotspots, while another 2 million will be built in partnership with local governments and retailers. Access to these will be free for Telstra fixed-line Internet customers, while others would need to pay.
Back in July information indicated that Google, Samsung, Time Warner Cable, Cisco and Verizon were discussing things over with the New York City officials regarding putting the unused phone booths to a good use by offering people Wi-Fi hotspots.
Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, proposed the project back in 2012 when he wanted to repurpose over 7,300 phone booths.