40 percent of pay phones out of order

JAKARTA: Forty percent of the 20,000 public phones in the city are out of order, mostly because of vandalism.

Sumilan, a Telkom division head, said that many of the phones were not functioning as they had been vandalized. In many cases, thieves had damaged the phones in order to steal the coins.

He also complained about decreasing revenue from public phones, which had motivated the state telephone company PT Telkom to transfer the management of the phones to the private sector, Antara reported Tuesday.

The revenue generated by PT Telkom from public phones has been decreasing because of the increasing use of cellular phones over the past three years.--JP