[asterisk-biz] SIP payphone

[Trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On 12/20/06, Jerry Romney <jromney at teltrust.com> wrote:
>
>  If you get a "smart" pay phone the intelligence to manage coin rates and
> call routing is done by the phone. I don't know of any way to do coin phone
> management without central office supervision except by using some kind of
> intelligence within the phone itself. In the US coin phone lines are
> available from the LEC's but I know of none offered VoIP.
>

if you are doing VoIP you have some sort of network connection.  Regardless
whether its a private network or the internet, you should be able to connect
to say a web server from within the dialing application itself.  It can send
the number to be dialed, etc.   A seperate process can run  that monitors
the coin hopper and send information on what was deposited to the same or an
interconnected server.  This way all management is done outside of the
phone, and even if someone were to gain control of the phone in a limited
way they still couldnt make free calls.  If they have enough access they
could simulate dropping coins, but generally that requires physical access.

With real payphones there are two major styles, at least in America where
pretty much anyone can own a payphone.  The first is what the incumbant
phone companies use, which has a really dumb phone that only sends data to
the central office when coins are deposited, and all management is done at
the CO.  The older style used tones 1700+2200 Hz to signal a coin.  This was
known as ACTS.  The newer ones use a digital line to signal that same
information and is harder for people to abuse by playing those tones.

The other is the standard COCOT (customer owned coin operated telephone)
such as elcotel makes.  It generally looks like a regular payphone, but it
has a computer inside which allows for rate tables to be applied to the call
and it will do everything locally.

In some areas the phone company wanted an additional $20-30 a month to do
ACTS (they were required to sell all the same services they use so they
tried to make it not cost effective).  In areas such as California UNE-P
went away, and now it costs $50/mo for a standard COCOT line (basically a
business phone line) and ACTS is extra.  This has effectively killed the
payphone market.

There are companies that do payphone calls over voip since they can do 1
channel easily enough on a $15/mo DSL line.  I do not know what equipment
they use, I had thought they said they were designing it themselves since
they couldnt find anything they liked on the market.

In essence you *could* use an ATA and any standard COCOT phone providing
there is room to stash the ATA inside the housing (or in a secure location
onsite).  Then your COCOT phone would work, and this upgrade would be more
trivial for existing installations.  And likely cheaper than replacing the
entire phone.

Another revenue stream in the US is PSP (payphone service provider) dial
around compensation.  When you dial a tollfree from a payphone in America,
the owner of the phone gets nothing, yet they are supposed to maintain  the
phone, pay for the phone line, etc.  So back in 1997 the FCC made a rule
that allowed them to bill the tollfree provider (who passes it through to
the customer in most ever case).  I think this amount is upto about 50
cents/call now.  Given that a payphone probably does > 10 calls a month (in
high density areas its like to be way more than that) it can amount to a
significiant percentage of the monthly bill.  But you generally have to set
the ANI2/flex ani code to 70 to trigger payment (this used to not always be
the case, but I havent run a payphone business since 1998 so I dont know if
it is now required or not).  It was a real pain if you didnt do that and
often you didnt get paid correctly if ani2 wasnt set, but ...

So if you run a voip payphone you may want to make sure that you can get
flex ani set properly for traffic so that you can get dial around
compensation.  I dont think voip payphones will increase fraud that
dramatically as the industry for PSP compensation is VERY skilled at
detecting fraud (most if not all the clearing houses share information and
the carriers are also looking for fraud this way).  But odds are someone
might have a bunch of payphones and decide to make an extra few dollars by
placing a few extra calls.  It still wouldnt be that much per phone per
month before the triggers are set off, even if they made sure to get numbers
that went over the different carriers networks.



-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast +44 28 9099 6461        US +1 712 432 7999
http://www.trxtel.com the VoIP provider that pays you!
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