Korean Payphones and Pagers: Seoul Before Smartphones

In the Seoul of 1996, if you needed to reach someone who was out, you paged them. Then you waited by a phone. Then they found a payphone, queued behind three other people, and called you back.

That loop, pager in the pocket and payphone on the corner, was how a country of 45 million people coordinated its dates, its deliveries and its emergencies for most of the 1990s. It collapsed in about three years. The pagers are gone entirely. The payphones are still there, in small numbers, kept alive by law.

This is Part 3 of our Vanished Seoul series.

How many payphones did Korea have, and how many are left?

About 150,000 in 1999, and 24,982 by 2023, on the government’s count.

📉 Public payphones in Korea

Some Korean reports put the 1999 peak at more than 500,000. That figure appears to count a much wider category, such as payphones rented to shops and buildings, so the government’s figure for public payphones is used here.

The usage figures explain the cuts. By Newsis’s 2024 count, a payphone averaged 30.8 calls and 25.7 minutes a month, less than a minute of talk a day. In Chungcheongbuk-do, 2023 data released by a National Assembly member put it at 16.4 calls a month, one every two days, the Chungcheong Times reported. KT’s payphone losses were 30.1 billion won in 2002 and still 13.7 billion won in 2021. In 2024 its dedicated payphone subsidiary, KT Linkers, was folded into another KT service company, partly because most of its staff were in their fifties and near retirement.

In May 2026 inews24 reported that KT plans to cut the network to about 5,000 units, concentrated in disaster-prone areas and places where emergency access matters, which would be roughly a fifth of the 2023 count.

What happened to the booths?

Many became something else. Because a booth has a footprint, a power line and a permit, it is valuable street furniture even when nobody calls from it.

Others simply stand empty. A Chungcheong Times reporter checking seven booths in Cheongju in February 2026 found four already removed and the rest used for rubbish or as parking markers.

How did the Korean pager craze happen?

It started quietly in 1982 and exploded in the mid-1990s.

The state telecom authority, today’s KT, launched wireless paging in Seoul in mid-December 1982, with subscriptions capped at about 300 at first. It stayed a doctor-and-executive device for a decade. What changed was competition: from May 1993 regional operators using the 015 prefix started competing with Korea Mobile Telecommunications’ 012 network, prices fell, and the 삐삐 (ppippi, after its beep) became a teenager’s accessory. Several Korean outlets put the peak at about 15 million subscribers in 1997, in a population of around 46 million.

That is more than twice the 6.91 million mobile phone subscriptions Korea had in December 1997, according to the government’s e-National Index. For a few years, a very large share of Korea carried a device that could receive a number and nothing else.

The collapse came with the mobile phone. Personal Communication Service (PCS) networks launched in October 1997 with cheaper handsets and two-way calls and text, and subscribers left paging in a flood: one account puts the total at about 3 million by 1999. The last operator on the old 012 network, RealTelecom, shut down in 2009, ending the pager’s 27-year run in Korea.

Before the pager went mass-market there was an even more exclusive gadget. Korea’s car phone service started in 1984, and according to the Hankook Ilbo a handset cost around 4 million won, more than a Hyundai Pony, the car most Koreans aspired to put it in. The pager was the democratic version: it could not talk, but almost anyone could afford one.

The fixed line followed the booth down. The e-National Index counted 20.42 million landline subscriptions in December 1997 and 12.21 million in December 2021, a decline it dates from 2003, while mobile subscriptions, counting connected devices, passed 71 million. The payphone and the home phone were two ends of the same copper network, and both lost to the handset in your pocket.

What was the CityPhone?

The most Korean dead end in telecom history, and it was built around payphones.

시티폰 (CityPhone), a CT-2 service, launched in the Seoul area in March 1997. It was a pocket handset that could only make calls, and only within 100 to 200 metres of a base station, many of which were mounted by payphone booths. The idea was that you carried your pager to receive and your CityPhone to call back, without queuing for the booth. It cost about a third of a mobile phone, signed up 200,000 people in two months and peaked at around 700,000, according to Digital Daily.

Then PCS arrived seven months later and did both jobs in one handset. CityPhone was down to about 179,000 users by October 1999 and closed in January 2000. It lasted less than three years.

How do you use a payphone in Seoul today?

With coins or a transit card. The Chungcheong Times reported in February 2026 that KT was ending credit and debit card payment at payphones from 19 February 2026, citing collapsing card use, while coin and transit-card payment continue. Dedicated payphone cards, once sold at every kiosk, stopped being produced years ago; a Korean reference wiki dates the end of the magnetic version to 2018.

The tariff has been 70 won per unit since 2002, according to the Seoul Shinmun. A Korean reference wiki puts that at roughly three minutes for a local call and about 38 seconds to a mobile. International calls cost more. Check the rate sticker on the phone itself, since KT has been reorganising the network.

Honestly, the practical case for a visitor is narrow: a dead phone, a lost phone, or a call that must come from a local number. For everyday connectivity, sort out a Korean number or eSIM before you arrive; our SIM and eSIM guide covers the options, and why a Korean phone number matters explains the verification wall you will hit without one.

The cultural case is stronger. A row of payphones outside a subway exit, with nobody using them, is a small monument to how quickly Korea rewired itself: from pagers to 2G to smartphones in about a decade, faster than almost anywhere. The prices of that era, from phone calls to subway fares, are in our history of Seoul transit fares and Seoul prices twenty years apart.