LG U+ Collect Call (1633 / 08217)

» see lguplus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There is a sentence a Korean phone line could play back at you, and it tells you everything about how this worked: 「착신자는 콜렉트콜 거부 가입자입니다」. The person you are calling has signed up to refuse collect calls. Somewhere in the system was a flag, and somebody had set it, and the call stopped there.

콜렉트콜, 수신자부담전화, the reverse-charge call. You dialed a prefix and then the number, and the cost landed on the other end at roughly three or four won a second, if they agreed to take it. Korea ran several of these in parallel, one per carrier, each with its own number and its own advertising campaign, which is how a four-digit billing prefix ends up being something a whole country can recite from memory.

LG U+ ran two of them. 08217 came first, launched by Dacom around the end of 1998, with KT answering the following year on 1541. 1633 was added later, and no source gives a date for it beyond coming second. In the first week of July 2024 LG U+ posted a notice saying both would end on 31 August, domestic and international alike. They did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the numbers, and who ran them ~

The Korean numbering plan keeps a table of these, which is the only tidy inventory of the lot. 1541 belongs to KT and to SK Telecom, and which one you reach depends on whose handset you are holding. 1655 is SK Broadband. 1677 is Sejong Telecom. 1633 and 08217 were LG U+, and the table now carries a bracket after them reading 2024년 8월 31일 서비스 종료.

One had already gone. SK Telink's 1682 is recorded as ending on 18 July 2020, though the contemporary press dates the international half of that to April, so even the register and the reporting do not agree. Worth stating plainly because it is easy to get wrong: one Korean outlet attributed 08217 to KT, and it was Dacom's. Korean Wikipedia pages for voice actors and comedians list 데이콤 08217 commercials among their credits, which at least shows how heavily these numbers were advertised.

~ the barracks ~

The clearest account of who actually used this comes from the Korean coverage of its closure, and it is about conscripts. Mobile phones were not allowed inside the barracks, so soldiers used collect calls steadily and for years, from a payphone, to a family that would accept the charge. A whole category of call existed because one group of people had money but no phone and another had a phone and would pay.

That arrangement ended on a schedule you can look up. The Korean military ran a pilot in four Army units from April 2018, and from July 2020 personal phones were permitted across every unit, after duty hours on weekdays and for most of the day on holidays. Four years later the numbers were switched off. The barracks payphone had been this service's last dependable customer, and whoever would once have queued at it was already carrying a phone.

1998 is also the year a modem took over the phone line in my house in Turkey for most of every evening. Different end of the continent, same single copper pair being argued over by two people who both wanted it for something. I never dialed a number like this one, and the specific thing it was for in Korea, a conscript at a barracks payphone with no coins on him, is not a situation I can claim any part of.

~ the ones still answering ~

LG U+ gave a reason and it was unsentimental: an unavoidable decision given that almost no one was using the service. The longer version from the Korean press is payphones vanishing first, then unlimited-minute mobile plans arriving around 2015 and removing the last reason to make somebody else pay for a call.

The other carriers did not follow. KT and SK Telecom both said they had no plans to stop, and neither did Sejong, and one industry source told Newsis the thing is cheap to keep running and still serves people in difficulty and in real emergencies. So 1541 and 1655 and 1677 were still live when this was written, which means Korea has a collect-call system with a hole in it where LG's two numbers used to be.

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