The way public telephones, whose use is decreasing due to the spread of mobile phones, has been reviewed.
It is expected that adjustments will be made in the direction of relaxing the national rules that stipulate that they should be installed in certain areas.
There are rules for installing
one
payphone
every 500 meters square in urban areas and one
payphone
every 1 kilometer square in other areas
, and more than 100,000 payphones are installed nationwide.
However, with the spread of mobile phones, the usage has decreased significantly, and the public telephone business subject to the rules of NTT East and West continues to be in the red.
For this reason, according to the people concerned, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has begun to make adjustments to ease the current rules, saying that they are no longer suitable for the social environment.
Relaxing the rules will reduce the number of regular payphones, so increase the number of emergency payphones that are pre-deployed at local government evacuation centers and convenience stores to secure means for making calls even in the event of a disaster. We will also consider this.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications will soon start a concrete study at a meeting of experts and will come to a conclusion by this summer.