Pay Telephone Views
Payphone revenues have sharply declined in many places, due to the increased usage of mobile phones. Payphone providers have sometimes tried to reverse the decline in usage by offering additional services such as SMS and Internet access, thus making their phone booths into Internet kiosks. The abandonment of payphones by telephone companies has angered some people[who?] who consider them a communication staple for low-income and low-credit consumers. In particular, payphones are useful for foreign or generally non-local travelers who need to place local calls, as well as those who simply don't like mobile phones.
Payphones were preceded by pay stations, manned by telephone company attendants who would collect payment for calls placed. In 1889, the first public coin telephone was invented by William Gray and installed at a bank in Hartford, Connecticut. The invention quickly caught on, and by 1902, there were 81,000 payphones in the United States. By 1905, the first outdoor payphones with booths were installed. By the end of 1925, 25,000 of these booths existed in New York City alone. In 1960, the Bell System installed its one millionth telephone booth. After the divestiture of Pacific Bell (California) and AT&T in 1984, it wasn't long before independent stores selling telephones opened up. After that privately owned payphones hit the market. In 2000, there were over 2 million payphones in the United States, today that number is around 700,000, the major carriers AT&T and Verizon have both exited the business, and this market is served by independent payphone companies now.
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 mostly kept in as 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.[citation needed]
A BT Chargecard[3] is a considerably cheaper way to call from any UK landline, including Payphones. Other cards which can be used are the Post Office phonecard,[4] Tesco international calling card[5] and many other telephone cards which can be bought from newsagents. However, some telephone cards do not work from BT payphones. It is not clear whether this is a card fault, or whether BT blocks some telephone cards.
Pay Telephone Images
