WELLINGTON residents were left without a public telephone after the High Street payphone suffered an outage.

The payphone attached to the RBS cash machine kiosk is the last remaining public telephone in the town after a number were removed in recent years.

But when a resident attempted to use the phone on Wednesday, they found the phone inoperable, and the display reading: 'offline.'

It is unclear when the outage began, but British Telecom pledged to fix the issue 'within days' when they were alerted to the issue.

A spokesperson from BT also confirmed there were no plans to remove the phone. In a statement they said:

"We are grateful to be alerted to the fact that the payphone is currently not working.

“Members of the public wanting to report a fault or damage to a BT Payphone can contact us via email with the telephone number and location of the faulty phone box, together with the nature of the fault and your contact details.”

According to Ofcom rules, BT are legally bound to maintain ‘essential phone boxes’ and cannot remove them if they are the only phone box in the area.

Working phone boxes must be accessible in places with little mobile coverage and in areas known for many accidents. If the phone box makes 52 calls per year, equivalent to one per week, the provider cannot intervene to remove it. 

If you would like to report an issue with any public telephone, contact BT via email at [email protected].