Millions of Americans may have mobile phones, and the vast majority of the population have fixed lines, but for those who have neither, the payphone network can be a lifeline.

Even in the 21st century, nearly 5 per cent of US households are without any phone service. This creates the need for programmes such as Community Voicemail, which gives people who need communication, but do not have access to phones, a phone number and voicemail system, so that messages can be left for them and retrieved, usually from payphones.

The programme, available in 38 cities across the US, is targeted at the poor and the homeless, who need access to messages to alert them to jobs, and who are almost impossible to contact through the shelters in which they live.

It is also aimed at battered, desperate women such as Cheryl.

She could not use the phone at her home, for fear that her abuser would rip it out of the wall and hit her. Instead, she would use payphones to access messages from counsellors who convinced her to leave.

Unfortunately the programme, which provides a basic but essential function, could face serious obstacles if current trends in the telecoms industry continue. The payphone, once ordinary and readily accessible, is disappearing from the American landscape. Since 1998, the number of payphones available has decreased by 400,000 and now stands at 2.2m nationwide.

Just last month, BellSouth, a Baby Bell that covers the southeast of the US, said it would quit the payphone business by December of 2002, focusing its attention instead on the future of its business; its wireless communications businesses, which includes wireless telephones and pagers and has already seen explosive growth over the past few years.

BellSouth's decision to abandon its 143,000 payphones, which may be picked up by alternative carriers, is not surprising. The company says it saw a dramatic decrease in usage after 1998, the year wireless telecoms companies started offering packages of minutes combined with mobile phones at a reasonable price and usage rates of mobiles skyrocketed.

Decreased use of payphones for people on the go since the advent of the mobile is not the only factor hitting payphone providers' businesses. BellSouth, along with Verizon, and private payphone operators are not paid for about 35 per cent of the calls made from their phones, according to Vince Sanbusky, president of the American Public Communications Council (APCC), a trade organisation which represent private payphone operators.

Until recently, payphone service providers, such as Verizon, faced the impossible: they had to collect compensation for coinless (prepaid) calls made from their payphones by multiple carriers that could not be tracked.

For example, in the past, a company like WorldCom sold minutes of payphone usage to resellers, or companies that sell calling cards and other methods of coinless phone service. Verizon has, over the past few years, been forced to turn to the resellers, not WorldCom, to receive payment. The task was largely impossible, because resellers, of which there are hundreds, were impossible to track.

In April, however, the Federal Communications Commission released an order that would modify the way payphone carriers collect their money, placing the responsibility of collecting the revenues from toll free calls on the first carrier of the call, or, in this case, WorldCom, which, for Verizon, could easily be traced.

Though payphone operators see the order as a move in the right direction by the FCC, Verizon, among others, says it has taken the US telecoms regulator too long to find a solution to a problem that has caused the payphone industry to lose what the APCC estimates to be about $300m per year.

However, despite the drawbacks, Verizon says it will remain in the payphone business, unlike BellSouth.

"We have started with about 400,000 payphones worldwide, and we intend to stick with them," Jim Smith, a Verizon spokesperson, says.

"With the challenges of wireless, we need to enhance our product line, so we have things in the marketplace that people in motion might need - such as internet kiosks. We are also experimenting with computer modem ports in payphones," Mr Smith adds.

Taxicab and bus users may even find a mobile payphone at their disposal down the road, he says.

In a time of declining revenue, Verizon is removing phones from some areas to increase returns from other areas. But cutting back in some localities does not mean the company is ruling out making a gain in market share in other lucrative areas, particularly as BellSouth makes its exit.

Meanwhile, Richelet Jean, director of Community Voicemail in New York, says the elimination of payphones contributes to a growing digital divide, and ignores a huge part of the population that uses them for everything from emergency calls to long-distance services.

"The payphone around the corner becomes the connection to everyday life," Mr Jean says.