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Australians will be able to make free calls from public payphones across the country under a new Telstra initiative.
Standard national calls and SMS from Telstra’s network of more than 15,000 payphones will be made free from Tuesday, while payphones will become completely coinless from October 1.
But consumers will still have to pay for overseas calls.
About 11 million calls were made across Telstra payphones in the past year, including 230,000 calls to critical services such as triple zero and Lifeline.
Telstra chief executive Andrew Penn said payphones were a vital lifeline, particularly for the homeless and people escaping an unsafe situation.
“I have been moved seeing firsthand queues of people waiting in line, to use a payphone to tell their family and friends they’re safe after a bushfire, a cyclone or some other natural disaster has taken the mobile network down,” he…
