Now 10 sen gives you only 2 minutes

THE government has reduced the duration for a 10-sen local call made from payphones across the country from three minutes to two minutes, due to escalating costs of maintaining and repairing the payphones, especially from rampant vandalism.

Deputy Information, Communications, Culture and Arts Minister Datuk Joseph Salang said the restructuring in tariff for public phone services will boost efforts to improve the availability of convenient and quality payphones nationwide.

"After taking into consideration the importance of public phones, we have decided to restructure the tariff for the payphone services," he said after launching Pernec Paypoint Sdn Bhd's latest "Helo 1" pre-paid payphone cards in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.Salang did not specify when the new tariff took effect, but that it was recently implemented.

He also said that the government has outlined guidelines that require an operator to install at least one payphone in rural areas for every two public phones installed in urban areas.It has also made it a requirement for operators of public phone services to install at least one public phone per village in the country.

"They (operators) are also responsible in providing maintenance for these public phones under the terms stiuplated in their licences," he said.There are currently four public phone providers, operating more than 100,000 payphones throughout the country. Pernec Paypoint alone has installed 44,000 units of payphones and expects to increase it to 60,000 units by the end of the year.

Pernec Paypoint, a subsidiary of Pernec Corp Bhd, said it expects to rake in some RM3 million in sales of its latest Helo 1 prepaid payphone cards over the next five months from its launch yesterday.Pernec's group chief executive officer Tengku Asmaluddin Tengku Arshad said the company expects greater demand from the public for the Helo 1 prepaid cards, particularly from students, parents, foreign workers as well as tourists.

"With the denomination value of RM5, this Helo 1 prepaid card is affordable and easy as well as convenient to get," he said.Prior to this, he said Pernec Paypoint managed to rake in some RM5 million per year from the sale of its stand-alone RM10 denominated payphone cards."These conventional cards are still available, but will gradually be phased out by next year," he said.

Pernec Paypoint is currently the leading provider of the local public phone services industry, with a 56.7 per cent market share.