Talk:Payphone

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Contents 1 Decline 2 Yank history 3 British charges 4 Picture clutter

[edit] Decline

But is the rise in popularity of cell phones the whole reason for pay phone extinction? I think not.

Nope. A lot of jurisdictions are removing them because drug dealers use them on the street and many druggies congregate around them, upsetting people in the community. BTW, is it payphone or "pay phone"? -- Zoe

Either. Payphone is probably slightly more common and grammatically less ambiguous -- Derek Ross MS Word picks up "payphone" as a misspelling, but "pay phone" passes muster. 66.216.138.30 (talk) 21:10, 3 April 2008 (UTC)jeff

Another reason for the extinction is the fact that it is the payphone owners have to go collecting the 49.4¢ mandated by the FCC. They have to find out who owns (completes the call to) the toll-free number and then go after that company. This process takes from 3-months to several years. Once upon a time it was the inter exchange carrier the call was passed off to that had to pay, but on 7/1/2004 the new rules went into effect which placed that burden on the completing carrier. Since then, MANY unscrupulous calling card operators have charged the 50¢-$1 to their customers but never passed those on to the payphone owners. 66.216.138.30 (talk) 21:10, 3 April 2008 (UTC)jeff

This page need serious cleanup. It needs to be divided into sections, as well as cited for "statistics" within it. -- Joe

[edit] Yank history

Add a history section. I want to know when the payphone was first introduced and when the different styles came out. Also, how those styles worked. I think the sound of the dropped coins used to be recognized by an operator who manually placed the calls in the early days.

What about payphone hacks? Phone phreaks used to use them. And there were all these simple tricks for getting free phone calls in the 80s without using special equipment (i.e. without blueboxes). If you took a paperclip, stretched it out like a wire, put one end into a hole in the mouth piece so it made contact with the metalic membrane in there and attached the other end to ground (the keyhole on the payphone usually made a good ground), you could get a free local call that way. No idea why that worked though.

Collect and return worked by simplex DC when I was repairing them in New York decades ago, while coin dedection was by AF filters picking up different tones for each value of coin. Sources, I don't have, nor do I remember much of the specifics since it was only a small part of my job. Jim.henderson (talk) 05:18, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] British charges

The charges on the page go back to 10p in 2000 but when did it change from 2p to 5p and then to 10p? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.145.120.118 (talk) 11:42, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Picture clutter

Too many pictures. Rather than gallerize, I'd like to nominate for deletion the Toronto, California, and Verizon photos as ugly or uninformative or poor in quality. Jim.henderson (talk) 04:59, 2 June 2008 (UTC)