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My first Norwegian payphone is Danish

Started by dsk, July 03, 2014, 02:14:25 AM

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TeleDK

also from Telefonica

dsk

#16
Today I got a "new" one  slightly different from this one:

The vault lock are located under the phone. (not on the left side as on this picture)  The upper lock is drilled but  the vault door lock is not drilled.
Pictures will follow.  I picked the phone up when I was driving my son to the railroad station so the cost of it is just NOK 300 or $35.25
(I had recently seen it in an ad.)  That is a good buy for a phone that is "impossible to get".  Pictures after Easter  ;D


Happy Easter everybody!


dsk


PS Here is the photo from the ad. (The vault lock are not in the photo) DS


RB

Happy Easter to you too!
Interesting story, and very nice payphone.
Love that cabinet it is hangin on too! :)

dsk

Not the right, but a related PDF

SpaceTime

#19
Sorry for opening an old thread, but just wanted to add that payphones were also used in Ireland in the 1970s, 80s and there were still some around in the 1990s

They were both rotary dial and touch tone versions in use and I remember the coin slide well.

Here's an anti-vandalism advert from the mid 1980s, featuring Bob Geldof (Boomtown Rats and organised Live Aid). It also features a GNT Automatic touch tone payphone in a 1980s Telecom Éireann (now known as Eir) phonebooth with Téléfon (Gaelic) signage.

https://youtu.be/2seo94SWh7Y

They were superseded by Landis+Gyr Phonotaxe 64 coin phones, very similar to those used by Deutsche Telekom in the same era and by Schlumberger smart card phones from 1988 onwards.

Payphone charging worked similarly to what's described in this thread.

Calls on the phone network were charged in units, rather than a monetary value. Each unit cost a certain amount, say 10 pence and on a normal residential / business line you would be billed in units (or itemised calls and units.) So if you made a local call, it charged 1 unit (untimed) and for long distance, international and premium rate calls, the number of minutes (or even seconds) per unit varied depending on the price of the call.

On a payphone line there was an audible meter pulse tone (12KHz) which informs the phone the call has been answered, and also to request payment for each additional unit used. On coin phones you loaded them with a stack of coins for long distance and the phone would drop the coins as their value was used up. So for example a 10p coin would drop after one unit or a 50p after 5 units and so on. Later payphones displayed the credit remaining on a little screen. These GNT Automatic phones just let you view them on the slide.

Phones were also fairly tamper proof. The microphone remains muted until a meter pulse is heard and charging begins, or if you dialled a free number, but there were various anti-phreaking approaches used. I don't think the digital switches ever used in-band signalling, but the Ericsson crossbars muted the line and played a ticking tone when any in-band signalling was going on. The digital switches also played out a "be be be be" tone while they were sending in-band signalling to older technology. So there were never many opportunities to for the hackers of old to play with the network using tones.

Cardphones also used units and the more units you bought on a prepay card, the cheaper the price per unit. Each time a meter pulse was heard by the phone another unit was debited until the card value was 0.

You could also rent a meter which displayed the number of units used per call. If you wanted to do this, you just had to request metering pulses to be turned on on the line. Some old PBX systems also used them for billing.

Often in bars and small hotels you could use their regular phone and a little "print a call" device would print out a receipt for the call and you just paid them for it. Some households even used them for keeping track of teenagers' calls!

As the telco monopolies ended and also as charging plans became more complex, the unit based systems were dropped but the 12kHz tone continues to be used for answer supervision on pay phone lines. However, they calculate their own rates and billing on software on the phone itself rather then relying on pulses from the PSTN switching system.

The last payphones used here were Landys+Gyr Trilogy, which accepted credit cards, coins and (for a time) the old prepaid smart cards (CallCard.)

These days you'll find restored classic Irish wooden phone booths in use as housings for public automatic cardiac defibrillators.

There were a few different frequencies used by different telcos around Europe, mostly 12kHz, 15KHz or 16kHz. Some also used polarity reversals, and the UK's GPO/BT at one stage used 50Hz, so there while pay phone suppliers often sold fairly identical models to different phone networks, their control systems would have been specific to whichever PTT they were being connected to. There may even have been different models / settings used on lines connected to specific types of switching system.

Jim Stettler

It is fine to re-open old topics.
A lot of new info gets added when old topics get brought up.
Also with 1400 new members, the old topics are new to many members.
Jim
You live, You learn,
You die, you forget it all.

dsk


deryck_dublin

Quote from: SpaceTime on April 15, 2022, 09:15:37 PMSorry for opening an old thread, but just wanted to add that payphones were also used in Ireland in the 1970s, 80s and there were still some around in the 1990s
They were rolled out by P&T in 1981 following a 7 year pilot (!) at a handful of locations. Unlike the A/B coinbox phones used previously, they allowed STD and ISD calls, quite a revolution!

SpaceTime

#23
I'd suspect GNT being a "partner of Ericsson" had a lot to do with their selection.

Ireland's P&T and it's successors began using Ericsson ARF, ARM and ARK crossbars from 1957 onwards and the company had a big manufacturing presence in Athlone as time went on and demand went up. ITT Pentaconta and some Hitachi crossbars were also used to a lesser extent.

A 7-year trial doesn't surprise me with P&T. They were a horrendously slow moving organisation, until they were finally spun out as Telecom Éireann in 1984. The only ambitious thing they ever did was to embrace digital switching in the late 70s.

Just for historical context:

In the digital PSTN era which began here in 1980/81, Ericsson AXE switched about 50% of the Telecom Éireann / Eir network, the rest running on Nokia (Alcatel) E10.

Just like everywhere else, those TDM systems are life expired and being phased out in favour of IP based systems, although there are dial tone services delivered by Nokia MSANs that are likely to be available for quite a while, and many of the core IP voice network services still run on Ericsson soft switches that are effectively descendants of AXE.

I could easily see how GNT pay phones likely arrived along with features being added to the 1970s Xbars.

Various pieces of French kit, including Schlumberger cardphones and even the Minitel videotext system (which never took off) were rolled out here, likely due to experience with Alcatel too.