Information about Payphones

A payphone or pay phone is a public telephone, with payment by inserting money (usually coins) or a debit card (a special telephone card or a multi-purpose card) or credit card before a call is made. Some telephone companies have termed them, and tried (unsuccessfully) to get the public to identify them as "coin phones", because the term "pay phone" may imply that other phones are free.

Locations

Payphones are often found in public places, transportation hubs such as airports or train stations, and on street corners. By agreement with the landlord, either the phone company pays rent for the location and keeps the revenue, or the landlord pays rent for the phone and shares the revenue. In some cases, particularly at gas stations, payphones are mounted in drive-up structures in which people in automobiles can make calls while still in their vehicles. The abandonment of payphones by telephone companies has angered some people who consider them a communication staple for low-income and low-credit consumers.

Payphones that accept coins have been largely discontinued in many places. They are expensive to maintain due to damage caused by vandalism, bodily fluids, or attempted theft of the cashbox. Revenues have sharply declined, due to the ubiquitous usage of mobile phones.

Additional services

Payphone providers have tried to reverse the decline in usage by offering additional services such as SMS and Internet access.

United States

In recent years, deregulation in the United States has allowed payphone service provided by a variety of companies. Such telephones are called customer-owned coin-operated telephones (COCOT), and are not always kept in good condition as compared with a payphone owned and operated by the local telephone company. COCOT contracts are usually more generous to the landlord than telco ones, hence telco payphones on private premises have been more often replaced than street phones. One common implementation is operated by vending machine companies and contains a hardwired list of non-toll telephone exchanges to which it will complete calls.

In the United States, the coin rate for a local direct-dialed station-to-station call from a payphone has been 50¢ in most areas since mid-2001, for an unlimited number of minutes. Previously, the charge had been per minute, or per number of minutes. During the 1960s and 1970s, the same call in the United States and Canada typically cost 10¢. In inflation adjusted terms, in 2006 USD, this was 68¢ in 1960, and 28¢ in 1979. While some areas only cost 5¢, smaller companies occasionally charged as high as 15¢ to 20¢. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this price gradually changed to 20¢, and again rose to 25¢ in some areas between 1985 and 1990 (47¢-39¢, inflation adjusted terms as above). In the late 1990s, the price rose to 35¢ in many areas.

In the United States, a payphone operator collects an FCC-mandated fee of 49.4¢ from the owner of a toll-free number for each call successfully placed to that number from the payphone. This results in many toll-free numbers rejecting calls from payphones in an attempt to avoid this surcharge; calling cards which require the caller to dial through a toll-free number will often pass this surcharge back to the caller, either as a separate itemized charge, a 50¢ to 90¢ increase in the price of the call, or (in the case of many pre-paid calling cards) the deduction of an extra number of minutes from the balance of the pre-paid card.

United Kingdom

In the UK, as in the USA, payphones have been deregulated. The great majority of them are still operated by British Telecom but there are other providers, mostly in urban areas. Birmingham, Leicester, London and Nottingham now have a greater concentration of non-BT payphones.

Pricing

Currently most (BT) payphones charge £0.40 for the first 20 minutes of any direct dialled national geographic call. Previously (before November 2006) the minimum charge was £0.30, before 2004 it was £0.20 and before 2000 it was £0.10.

Timeline

• 1891: William Gray patents his coin-operated telephone
• 1920: General Post Office (United Kingdom) introduces K1 public telephone kiosk

Device

• Nortel Centurion 1970s-1980s
• Nortel Millennium 1990s
• QuorTech Millennium 1990s-present
• QuorTech Olympian 5501 1990s-present
• GTE Automatic Electric 120-type

See also

• Telephone booth
• Red telephone box

External links

• World Payphone Images
• 2600: Payphones of the World
• For North America:
• Payphone Project
• Payphone Directory
• The McPayphone Database
• YAPL: Yet Another Payphone List