payphones.com

[southernphoneman]

has anyone had good or bad experiences with payphones.com?

[G-Man]

I already have a large supply of payphones and parts but even if I didn't I still wouldn't use them since their prices are too high. Also, most of there parts are generic and for COCOTS.

You should be able to get most anything for single-slots from the Classic Rotary Phones Forum, ATCA or TCI.

That said, this should probably be in the "Vendors - Experiences - Good or Bad" section.

[poplar1]

When I worked for the State of Georgia telecom dept., we used to buy used Charge-A-Call type phones from payphones.com to use in a mental hospital. They weren't AT&T and the insides were cheap looking. We also ordered lots of handsets with armored cords. Payphones.com guaranteed that they would sustain a couple hundred pounds of someone pulling on them. Maybe so, but the patients would twist the handset until the armor broke, then the wires would be twisted until they also broke.

This hospital had purchased (SIP or Sold in Place) some already installed BellSouth pay phones when BellSouth got out of the pay phone business. These had been in service for many years, but had been converted to smart phones while they were still owned by Bellsouth. Before we took over maintenance, we had transferred the phones from the pay phone lines to centrex lines. The hospital paid Payphones.com to call in remotely to each phone and program them to make all calls free and to insert a 9 on any 10-digit local call. Centrex lines were cheap--they cost us about $10 per month each. Our CSRs were able to restrict the Centrex lines to block long distance. However, I never could convince the customer to disconnect the pay phone lines---which were billed directly to the agency so we couldn't tell Bell to disconnect them. For all I know, they are still paying $50 or more for each business line sitting without cross-connects in the equipment room.

When we changed out the old WE phones, at first we bought "Prison phones" from Pelco in Birmingham, Alabama. Pelco had bought all 140,000 pay phones from BellSouth as scrap.  Sam at Pelco would put the old 32A chassis back in, put a shorting plug in the 32A so that a totalizer wasn't needed for continuity, and weld  blank plates over the coin return opening and the coin slot. They still had 29A and 30C locks.

My boss got tired of trying to pay Pelco with paypal---Sam didn't take State credit cards---so that is when we changed to payphones.com and their Charge-A-Call phones.

Somewhere I have some of the 1Ds with smart boards that fell off my truck. I've heard that once the battery on the smart board dies, you're out of luck. There's nothing in the manual I had to show how to insert a 9 or absorb a 9, but I could have used them as is behind a Panasonic 616.