Public Payphone Calls Free For Everyone?

Under a new Telstra initiative, the company recently announced that they will be making public payphones available to all across the country starting October 1, 2021. The company has already started providing standard national calls and SMS on more than 15,000 pay phones from Telstra completely free to users. The only service that users will have to pay for is to make overseas calls.
The company’s owner, Andy Penn, decided to take this initiative during this era where mostly everyone uses a smartphone to make all necessary calls.
This is not the first time that the company made the call free for Australians. Last year during the bushfire incident, the company had provided free access to around 600 payphones from January 2020 to March 2020 to all the bushfire victims.
Even with having a smartphone in this era, there are still about 11 million calls made every year through payphones. The owner further clarified that about 200,000 of those calls were made for a critical type of situation. Hence the decision to make the phones available for all Australians at no additional charges. The company’s main goal is to contribute for a better environment and have people get connected with each other anytime they need to, anywhere in Australia.