Phone Box Gets New Life in Mobile Currency
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
In technology-obsessed Korea, phone booths appear to be going the way of the dinosaurs. However, KT, the country's largest telephone company is desperate for a wireless splash, and plans to give the public coin telephone new life through electronic payment.
The company will allow the users of its "T-Money" mobile payment services, provided on microchip-embedded third-generation (3G) handsets to pay for fees on buses and subways, to recharge their accounts at the phone boxes.
T-Money users can dial "**1" on public phones, punch in their mobile-phone numbers and insert up to eight 100-won or 500-won coins at a time.
The charged amount will then be wired to their handsets through a multimedia text messages.
The service will be enabled on more than 16,000 public phones in Seoul and Gyeonggi Province that allow users to make calls with their public transport payment cards.
The use of public phone booths significantly increases the number of venues where T-Money users could recharge their accounts, and provide them a better way to use the loose change in their pockets.
KT officials also say that the coin-based service will ease the complaints of consumers, who were previously prevented from adding less than 1,000 won to their T-Money accounts.
"Previously, T-Money users had to look for designated shops to recharge their cards, but the use of the phone booths will ease this discomfort. We will continue to develop and deploy more creative services enabled by the USIM cards embedded in handsets," said an official from KT's wireless data business division.
In a country with more mobile phones than people, public telephones have been losing their relevance.
There are currently around 97,000 public phones around the country, according to the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), but the government plans to discard about 17,000 by 2012.
KT, the former state telecommunications monopoly, has been operating the public phones and had requested policymakers to allow it to reduce the numbers, citing growing losses.