Pay phone use plummets as cellphones boom

Telecom says it has no plans to abandon its public pay phones, despite the huge rise in mobile phone use in the past five years.

In 2003 the number of pay phone calls in New Zealand peaked at 30 million annually, but since then it has dropped to just 12 million a year.

The number of phones has dropped from 5000 to 4000 in the same time.

Telecom won't say what its pay phone network is worth or how much money it makes, but says there are no plans to get rid of the network just yet.

Around the world, pay phones have been on the decline. United States phone company AT&T announced last year it was getting out of the pay phone business.

Jordan in the Middle East generally abandoned pay phones in 2004 because of high cellphone penetration, and Finland followed soon after. In Australia phone company Telstra is getting rid of its pay phones.

This year the number of mobile phones in New Zealand outstripped the number of people in the country.

But Telecom spokesman Ian Bonnar said the company was not at the stage of withdrawing its pay phone network, "and not likely to be in the near future".

Mr Bonnar said it was a fairly safe assumption the drop in calls was directly related to the proliferation of cellphones.

Under the Telecommunications Service Obligations there is no obligation for Telecom to keep a minimum number of pay phones, or pay phones in certain areas, as there are in other countries.

However, although it had taken a hammering, the pay phone did have a future in New Zealand, Mr Bonnar said.

Telecom was in the early days of web phone booths, where people can surf the internet. There is also advertising revenue available in the booths.

"Even though numbers have declined, there are still 12 million calls. It's still a service people find valuable," Mr Bonnar said.

"We continue to invest in the network and still putting some in, but we will take some out where they are gathering dust.

"It's a gentle pruning exercise rather than large scale deforestation."

The busiest pay phones were still those outside prisons, CBDs, Auckland Airport and near the Sky Tower in Auckland.

The least used phone was not in the middle of nowhere, but one of four phones in Auckland's Vector Arena, which was used just twice in a year.

Telecom had surveyed people using the phones earlier this year, and it was hard to discern a pattern and who was actually using them, Mr Bonnar said.

They were used because people did not have cellphones, no land line, were travelling or just for convenience.

Mr Bonnar said Telecom was careful to talk to a community before removing a phone - and would not always remove one just based on the numbers of calls made.