Pay phones have long been facing an inevitable identity crisis. With everyone carrying phones in their pockets, what use are they? As of 2015, in New York, they’ll be turned into thousands of internet connected hotspots offering a range of local services.

Australia’s long forgotten payphone booths (only 9% of people used one in 2013) will be repurposed as Wi-Fi hotspots. It's part of a plan to blanket public spaces with internet, launched by Telstra, the country’s largest telecommunications and media company.

The Cyber Security Research Council had a hunch people weren’t reading the terms and conditions when they logged onto free wifi networks. So they created a hotspot with a hidden clause; users had to “assign their first born child to us for eternity” – people still signed up.

An idea has been submitted to New York City's Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge that turns the payphone into a digital input/output system. The idea is to transform the city's payphone into digital nodes that let people pay bills or for parking.