hankyoreh

Seoul, the capital of South Korea, has been dubbed a global information technology hub that offers all the latest in high-tech communications, from wireless Internet to video e-mail.

But Ki Hyun-jung, 33, who had lived in Argentina for the past decade and recently visited here, found that the city lacked a basic communications device as she was waiting for one of her friends downtown who was late for an appointment.

"My friend had a cell phone, but I didn't. I had no idea how to reach her since there were no pay phones around," Ki said. "I could not help waiting until she showed up."

With the rise of mobile phones and other innovative communications tools, pay phones, which used to be easy to find a decade ago, are disappearing from the streets at a fast pace, as is happening in other advanced countries such as Britain and France.

"Fewer and fewer people need pay phones these days," said Oh Jae-rok, a spokesman for KT Linkus, the operator of the public pay phone business in South Korea. "People carry their own phones and they do not care about the change."

For most South Koreans, mobile phones have gone from a luxury item when they were introduced here in the late 1980s, to a necessity. They are not only a means of voice communication, but convey all kinds of services such as text messaging, the Internet, gaming and even photo and video e-mail.

According to the latest industry data, there are 39.8 million mobile phone users in South Korea, which has a population of 48.5 million, meaning four out of every five Koreans own at least one mobile phone. The number is expected to exceed 40 million this year.

The fast penetration of mobile phones is not only changing people's way of life but turning the once-familiar scene of people waiting in a long line to use a pay phone into a distant memory.

"People did not mind waiting in line to make a brief call years ago," said Koh Eun-jung, an office worker in Gwanghwamun, central Seoul. "But now it has become a rare occasion to see a person calling from a public phone."

The first telephones in Korea were installed in the royal palace compound in 1896. Public pay phones were introduced to South Korea in 1962, when 10 phones were installed in Seoul. Over the past decades the mechanical pay phones were replaced by dial phones and later push-button ones, and more recently by ones that use prepaid cards.

At that time, when fixed-line phones were not widely available in homes, pay phones had enjoyed popularity. The number of pay phones in service peaked at 500,000 nationwide in 1999, according to KT Linkus.

But pay phones started to lose their luster over the past years in the face of wider use of mobile communications, while store and shop owners also wanted the seldom used pay phone boxes to be removed because they blocked signboards or looked bad. Their numbers declined sharply to 228,000 as of September this year, and the income from pay phones has likewise plunged. KT Linkus saw revenue of 641.1 billion won (US$682.7 million) from pay phones in 1999, but this fell to 85.8 billion won in 2005.

This year's revenue shows no sign of improvement, it added.

People complain that they cannot find public phones when they need one desperately, and many of them are out of order or only operational with prepaid phone cards.

"You can see quite a few pay phones in congested areas, but many of them are not working and some are only for prepaid cards.

Who would buy a cash-deposit card for just a couple of calls in a year?" a resident in northern Seoul said.

It does not make economic sense to keep the service, but public phones are still necessary in emergencies and provide a crucial communications tool for those who cannot afford a cell phone, advocates say.

"The pay phone business is incurring losses but we think we have to maintain it, because otherwise the absence of the service would cause huge inconveniences for people," an official at the Ministry of Information and Communication said.

The government is running a fund to provide subsidies for pay phones and other money-losing public services. The subsidies are financed by earnings from the nation's leading network operators, including SK Telecom Co. KT Linkus said that it received 45 billion won in subsidies from the program last year.

KT Linkus is looking at ways to improve the pay phone service.

The company is to introduce phones that would allow users to send text messages and log onto the Internet.

"We are planning to install 25,000 such high-tech pay phones by 2007 in Seoul and elsewhere," Oh said. "Also, we will enhance the ambience of public booths to dismiss the negative images attached to them."

The company said even if everyone in the country has a mobile phone, public pay phones will not go extinct since there are places where the service is crucial, such as hospitals and rural areas where mobile communications is not available.

But the cultural shift in communications is something that cannot be reversed, and pay phones, which were once easily found on streets here, will not likely return to their heyday, observers say.

Seoul, Nov. 4 (Yonhap News)