Mercury Communications Ltd and Paytelco, which has been set up as a operating division of GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd specially for the purpose, yesterday announced their intention to extend the existing Mercury network of public payphones by installing enhanced Mercury units in a number of mostly indoor sites provided by four independent core operators – Associated Leisure, Boots, Shell and Trust House Forte – contracted to Paytelco and connected to the present Mercury network by British Telecommunications lines. The new Mercury phones will have volume controls, an LCD panel displaying advertisements, and pre-programmed hot-lines to various commercial services; calls will be charged at the present rate, payable by credit card or Mercurycard. Alex Findlay, director of Paytelco, argued that the UK payphone market, now properly liberalised, had room for further expansion, since the UK had in fact a relatively small proportion of payphones per capita – only about a quarter as many as in the US, a fifth as many as in Japan. The various commercial possibilities of the project were also stressed: operators such as the four above would have an alterative source of income from the installations, both from their cut of the value of calls made and from advertising revenue, while taxi, car rental firms and other services could use the hot-line feature to increase business. Paytelco, which is responsible for installation, maintenance and general management of the phones, intends to start installing around December of this year, with an expected 3,000 phones in place in Boots’ stores, Shell petrol stations and other sites by April 1990, with 9,000 by Christmas of that year. Paytelco fought shy of giving the exact figure of the initial investment, but clearly this represents a substantial and long-term committment to the payphone service; when asked if this betrayed a lack of faith in the future of potentially competing developments such as Telepoint, or whether its investment in the payphone network failed to take into account the increasing numbers of mobile phones, Paytelco stated that the aim of the project was to increase customer choice, and reiterated that, based on the success of similar networks abroad, such as in Singapore, it was confident the UK was still hungry for the payphone service provided by Mercury. A TV and press promotional campaign, directed by Saatchi & Saatchi, will start next spring; meanwhile, Paytelco is eager to talk to other outfits interested in becoming operators.
