HAMBURG Mobile phone technology has cut demand for public telephones in railway stations and town centers, but the public phone booth in Germany still has a future, DPA reported on Wednesday.

Although millions of Germans now have mobile phone contracts as well as a private telephone line, Deutsche Telekom (DT), Europe's largest telecoms company, plans to take public telephones into the new telecommunication age with two new models of phone booths.

It is planning to install 1,000 "Telekiosks" across the country that will "bring the Internet onto the streets," said DT spokesman Stephan Broszio. The dark gray multimedia terminals will offer people the chance to surf the Internet as well as simply make a telephone call.

At the start of this year DT also launched new "Telestations", slim metal columns, usually without a roof, containing modern push-button telephones.

The number of public phones has dropped in Germany in the last decade from 160,000 in 1990 to just 135,000 today.

Many public phone booths do not even cover their costs, said Broszio. A local call costs just 20 pfennigs (around 10 U.S. cents) per minute, a national call 40 pfennigs (around 20 cents). But a telephone booth costs around 750 marks ($369) per month in maintenance and cleaning.

Added to this comes the huge cost of vandalism. Cut wires, smashed windows and ripped and stolen telephone books cost Deutsche Telekom a total of around 10 million marks ($4.78 million) a year.

Nevertheless, DT is not planning any cuts in the public phone network. This is partly the result of a regulation passed in 1997 called the Telecommunication Universal Service Ordinance, which stipulates the maintenance of the universal provision of public telephones.