In a bid to halt the ongoing demise of fixed phone services, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone group on Friday launched L-mode, a text-based Internet browsing service that does not require a computer.

NTT East Corp. and NTT West Corp. have been hit by decreasing revenues from their fixed-line phone services, and the total number of mobile-phone users has exceeded that of conventional phones.

L-mode is a fixed-line version of the i-mode service provided by cellular operator NTT DoCoMo Inc.