Talking to Strangers on the Bus in the 90s

In one sense - Mobile Phones have been the greatest thing ever.

In Australia - you had the national carrier - Telstra, and it costs around $40 a month LINE RENTAL and the RENT of the Phone... And the land line calls were super steep in country Australia - like $1,20 a minute.

So your stuck to the plug in the wall and bled through the arse for the costs of the calls - like $200 - $300 a month for just general stuff....

And initially the mobile phones and the mobile phone plans were outrageously expensive - but now you can buy a really good but low spec phone for $200... and unlimited calls for like $10 a month with a few gig of data.

The land lines have gone the way of the Do Do - and Telstra's street corner payphones = they were such a rip off to use to call anyone anywhere...

They were too stupid to offer a flat rate anywhere in Australia for 10 minutes for a $1.... Instead of turning the public payphone into a communal sacred site, they gouged everyone for everything, and turned them into artifices of contempt.

Nope they gouged people on local calls, and increments of distances after 30K, then you get day rates, night rates, off peak rates, week end rates.... So you had to go to the payphone with sacks of coins and to be throwing them in by the handful....

And in

It's no wonder the mobile phones just left the land line network for dead.

Telstra fucked themselves over big time....