Do Web kiosks have a future?

Once, Web pay phones seemed a no-brainer. People wanted continual Internet connectivity, even away from home. Those who didn't want to lug a laptop would pay per minute for access, just as they did for telephone service. And those with no Internet experience would want a taste before plunking down big bucks for a computer. Right?

Not quite, judging by field tests of at least one carrier. Stand-alone kiosk or pay phone/computer hybrid, the public Internet access device may have a future, but it has some big bumps on its road to acceptance.

First, running high-speed lines to public Internet PCs is much more costly than provisioning a bank of analog phones. Cincinnati Bell ran a five-month field trial that connected five kiosks to the Internet via ISDN lines. The carrier charged $1 for four minutes' access and did not make the $65 monthly cost of the ISDN line on several of the test PCs, said Don Frericks, Cincinnati Bell's general manager for public phone services.

Moreover, Cincinnati Bell's kiosk was too big to stand next to phone banks. "We had to find a 4 foot by 4 foot space for this thing," Frericks said. "If you can shrink the size, you really change how you can display the device. Now you can take a pay phone out and fill that space with a Web device."

Proximity to pay phones is key, said Francie Mendelsohn, president of Summit Research Associates. "No question, you have to put these devices near the bank of phones," she said. But in many prime locations such as airports and convention centers, pay phones are already contracted out to another provider that won't permit co-location.

Maintenance was another headache-and not just at the network level. Accepting cash meant dealing with bill changers that jammed regularly. That's why Atcom/Info, which makes software for Internet kiosks and operates its own line of CyberBooths, accepts only credit cards and prepaid cards in its machines, as does Canada PayPhone, an operator gearing up to deploy 150 Web pay phones across Canada this year using Atcom/Info software.

As for keeping operations running, iCom Network-which just received approval to install kiosks in lobbies of an undisclosed number of Marriott hotels-maintains a network operations center in San Diego to run continuous diagnostics on its units.

But Internet kiosks will inevitably go down, no matter what diagnostics are run, Frericks said. "Some of our machines would stay stuck on a page for days," he said. "We didn't know about it because in an airport or a public place, people don't know who to report that to."

Many of these problems are more easily overcome in Europe, where smart cards are widely used and PTTs still have virtual monopolies over the pay phone business. That's where most Web pay phone requests for proposal are coming from today, said Tom Caldwell, Atcom/Info's vice president for sales and marketing. "In this country, it's usually the pay phone operators that see this as an extension of their business," he said. "To many of the phone carriers, it means setting up a whole new set of business systems, and it may not be worth it."

Mendelsohn is optimistic enough about solving these maintenance issues that she predicts the U.S. Web pay phone market will grow from about 5000 in 1998 to 44,000 by 2000-mostly on the strength of e-mail.

But iCom Marketing Director Michael Marashlian said just getting the current product out before the public is enough-for now. As computing migrates from the device to the Web, Internet-access telephones will become an important way to perform applications. "We're probably a year or two away from having them present everywhere-we need more high-speed lines available, for one thing. But some day, whenever you see a bank of public phones, you'll see these Web pay phones," he said.

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