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Payphone Go

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Re: Payphone Go

#71

Post by toast0 »

flyinghamster wrote: post #54
drkrab wrote: post #47

In Denmark there are no payphones. Like none. The copper network is being decommissioned.

That's happening piecemeal in the US as well. Any "landline" phone service at this point will be coming from a box hooked up to your internet service, quite the flip from the old days of dialup internet.

I still have a copper landline direct to a real central office; for my Mother in Law. $60/month and the phone company made it very difficult to setup 3 years ago; they really don't seem to want to be a phone company anymore.

Pulse dialing still works, and the automated voicemail system that the CO switch runs has zero perceptible latency (unfortunately, they won't give me the PIN to set it up)

Re: Payphone Go

#72

Post by ninalanyon »

cyberax wrote: post #52
tadfisher wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landline phone calls should just be free at this point. Put like 0.0001% of mobile profit into a fund and surely you can maintain the existing POTS payphone base. POTS-quality voice is like a rounding error in bandwidth, but we're saddled with POTS-era costs for connections.

It's not the traffic but the CO equipment and copper line maintenance.

They don't need to be landlines. Just put a mobile phone in a steel box.

Re: Payphone Go

#73

Post by tl2do »

toast0 wrote: post #70
tl2do wrote: post #61

Quick telephony question: how can calls from payphones to (888) 683-6697 be toll-free for the caller? I’m Japanese, so I may be missing something, but I don’t understand the mechanism that makes this free (or low-cost enough) to run as a free service.

Most countries have some numbers with receiver pays or reverse billing as a feature. Sometimes called 'free phone'. My research says Japan has several prefixes, 0120, 0800, 0088, 0531, although not all phone numbers in these prefixes are available to all callers. In the US, holders of a toll free number pay their carrier a per minute rate (sometimes with billing increments of 1 second), as well as a fee per call from…

Thanks. Your explanation can solve my question. In Japan, the receiver will pay for toll free call around 30 yen per call. Here it is difficult to run free service like Payphone Go considering the cost.

Re: Payphone Go

#74

Post by cyberax »

ninalanyon wrote: post #72
cyberax wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the traffic but the CO equipment and copper line maintenance.

They don't need to be landlines. Just put a mobile phone in a steel box.

There are phones like this along the highways. They also tend to use high-power microwave links instead of mobile networks, so they work even with no regular phone coverage.

Re: Payphone Go

#75

Post by ninalanyon »

drkrab wrote: post #47

In Denmark there are no payphones. Like none. The copper network is being decommissioned.

Same in Norway. There are about a hundred phone boxes left as protected objects. Most are used as free libraries as far as I can tell.
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