CARACAS, Venezuela: Opening Venezuela's telecommunications industry to foreign competition has brought more than greater choice and cheaper telephone services for Venezuelans.

It has also delivered a mini-boom for entrepreneurial street vendors whose wireless telephones - aided by a surge in vandalism - spell trouble for public call boxes in Venezuela.

"It's organized crime inspired by a street vendor mentality," moaned Enzo Pittari, general manager for mass markets at Venezuela's largest telephone company, CANTV. "They are destroying our (call box) business."

At a cost of up to 1.5 million bolivars (US$1,000) to install a new pay phone, it is an expensive problem. CANTV estimates it has lost US$2 million so far. The situation is so acute in some areas that CANTV has given up replacing vandalized phones.

Ever since cell phone rival Telcel - a subsidiary of US giant BellSouth - launched an innovative fixed wireless telephone last year for those not reached by the traditional copper cable network, CANTV has seen its monopoly of the domestic telephone market dwindle.

Telcel has signed 275,000 subscribers to its fixed wireless service, almost 10 per cent of the country's fixed line telephone market.

The vast majority of customers are in shanty towns that ring large cities like Caracas.

Hillsides packed with improvised zinc-roofed shacks are forever outgrowing the reaches of CANTV's land lines. But Telcel's wireless CDMA (code division multiple access) signal can be picked up across 98 per cent of Venezuela with a simple antenna-equipped telephone.

CDMA technology converts speech into digital information that is transmitted as a radio signal and picked up by individual telephones.

Service has improved enormously since the early 1990s, when CANTV was still state-owned and getting a dial tone, let alone making a call, was a chore.

Privatization in 1991 was followed by a widely acclaimed opening of the sector to competition in 2000. Venezuela, with a population of 24 million, has doubled its number of telephone lines in 12 years to nearly 3 million.

With it has come rising vandalism of CANTV's nationwide network of public call boxes. Some 1,500 of the 85,000 call boxes are permanently out of order. Many more are repeatedly torn from their posts in the busiest pedestrian areas of Venezuela's largest cities.

Agencies via Xinhua