Bought this at the recent ATCA show. I listed it in the Aug find of the month contest and was asked to start a separate post so people could comment on it. This pay phone was owned by RN communication of Port Huron Michigan and according to the Michigan Sect of state's offoce was voluntarily dissolved in 2007. Which must of been a time when these private pay phone companies were being hit hard by the wide spread use of cell phones.
I was hoping it would have been made by Lucent But it is marked Made in Taiwan. (Republic of China).
Mike's Vintage Telephone site says these had to be programmed by AT&T but it appears it powers up with a default program.
Anyone have one of these?
From Wikipedia:
After the breakup of the Bell System in 1984, it was not long before independent stores selling telephones opened up. After that privately owned payphones hit the market. Sources differ as to whether the peak number of payphones in the United States was 2.6 million in 1995[21] or 2.2 million in 2000.[22] Since 2007, the number of payphones in the United States in operation has declined by 48%. In July 2009, AT&T officially stopped supporting the Public Payphone service. Over 139,000 locations were sold in 2009. At the end of 2012, the FCC reported the number of payphones at 243,487[23] generating $362 million falling to $286 million by 2015.[24] The major carriers, AT&T and Verizon, have both exited the business, leaving the market to be served by independent payphone companies.[25] An estimated 100,000 payphones in the US remain as of 2018, with roughly a fifth of them located in New York City. [26]
A Verizon payphone on a street corner in Silver Spring, MD
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.[citation needed] 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.[further explanation needed] One common implementation is operated by vending machine companies and contains a hard-wired list of non-toll telephone exchanges to which it will complete calls.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
