Spark has abandoned its plan to replace New Zealand’s public phone booths with modern kiosks offering free calls, Wi-Fi and phone charging, and will pull out the remaining booths over 2027 and 2028. The company announced the decision on 16 October, blaming a failure to reach agreement in Auckland on the digital advertising that was meant to pay for the new network.
In a statement the company said it had “explored a range of options with local and central government to deliver the modern phone booth proposal but was unable to secure the agreements needed to progress the proposal in Auckland”. It added, “Without a nationwide rollout, the proposal was not commercially viable.” Spark has also stopped selling and reordering phone cards, which means the cards will no longer be available to buy.
Spark chief corporate affairs officer Leela Ashford said the company understood what the booths meant to some people. “We recognise that phone booths can be an important lifeline for some of New Zealand’s most vulnerable people, particularly those without reliable access to a mobile phone or internet connection. They are often used to contact essential services, including social development agencies, banks and emergency services,” she said.
“While we are disappointed that we have not found a way to proceed with our proposed investment, we remain open to revisiting the modernisation proposal if circumstances change in the future.”
The network has been shrinking for years. 1News reported that New Zealand had 2,500 public phone booths at the peak and that just 212 are still in service today. Spark says the removal programme is already underway. “The removal programme is underway, with around 90% of booths now disconnected from copper. The physical removal of booths will follow over 2027 and 2028, in line with council requirements,” the company said.
The booths are being disconnected because the copper telephone network that runs them is being switched off. When Spark first announced its modernisation plan in May 2022, product director Tessa Tierney said call volumes on the fixed-line booth network had fallen by nearly 70 per cent over the previous four years and that about 90 per cent of booths were used for less than three minutes a day on average. She said at the time, “Some of the physical equipment is not even being manufactured anymore, and we’re running low on spare parts to use when there are faults, which leaves some booths non-operational.” Spark said then that the existing booths could not be upgraded to fibre or wireless, so keeping a public phone service would mean replacing them with a new end-to-end solution.
Chorus, which owns the copper lines, told the NZX on 15 April 2026 that it had brought forward the planned retirement of its copper network to 2028 from the previously signalled 2030. About 53,000 copper lines were still in service nationwide at the end of March 2026, down 10,000 in a single quarter, and chief executive Mark Aue said the network was by then serving around 2.5 per cent of households.
What Spark proposed instead was a smaller network of new booths paid for by advertising screens. The company says similar services operate in London and New York, and that in Australia making comparable services free supported around 25 million calls in a year, including around 300,000 emergency calls. The NZ Herald reported that Spark had proposed about 400 modern booths nationwide, including about 150 in Auckland, as a joint investment with the outdoor advertising company oOh!media, and that a nationwide rollout was expected to cost around $50 million. The Spinoff reported in December 2025 that the national project had been suspended in October 2025 because no agreement had been reached in Auckland, and that Spark and Auckland’s roading authorities disagreed over whether the Telecommunications Act 2001 gave Spark the right to install the new booths without a separate approval.
Spark and Auckland Council give different accounts of why the Auckland piece never fell into place. 1News reported Spark’s position that it did not lodge a formal application because the arrangement under discussion required it to share part of its advertising revenue with the council as well as with the outdoor advertising agency, and that splitting the revenue three ways while splitting the costs two ways would not be cost effective. The Herald reported that Mayor Wayne Brown’s position is that Spark must pay to use council land for its advertising.
Auckland Council general counsel Meredith Webb told 1News the council “has made no decision to stop or block Spark’s proposal”. She said council and Auckland Transport staff had met Spark several times and explained how the proposal could proceed. “At that time decision-making responsibility for roads and footpaths sat with Auckland Transport, so Spark was advised to make an application based on the proposal to Auckland Transport. However, no application was ever made,” she said. The council’s view, as reported by 1News, is that commercial billboards sit outside the infrastructure a telecommunications company can install in the road corridor under the Telecommunications Act, so an approval process was required. “If Spark wishes to progress the proposal any further, the council remains open to further discussions and guidance,” Webb said.
Spark also asked the Government to change local government law to exempt the digital billboards. Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith told 1News, “It requires a legislative fix which we weren’t in a position to do,” and said he was not surprised the booths were fading out. “Most people have their own phones and so I’m not surprised that the number of phone booths is dwindling away,” he said.
Public telephones have been part of New Zealand streets since the 1910s, according to The Spinoff, and passed from the Post Office to Telecom when the state telephone business was split off in the 1980s. In her 2022 statement Tierney said, “Phone booths became part of Spark in our Telecom days of the 1980s, when we split from the New Zealand Post Office, and in 2013 we upgraded many of them to include WiFi hot spotting.”
Spark said in 2022 that it expected the vast majority of New Zealanders would not notice the change, and with around 90 per cent of booths already disconnected most of the network has already gone dark. The people Spark itself identifies as most affected are those without a reliable mobile phone or internet connection who use a booth to reach a government agency, a bank or the emergency services. Spark says it is now working with councils to remove the existing booths safely, with the physical removal running through 2027 and 2028, and that it remains open to revisiting the modernisation proposal if circumstances change.
Do you still see anyone using a phone booth, and should New Zealand’s cities have fought harder to keep a free public phone on the street? Tell us in the comments.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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