<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/20/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jerry Romney</b> <<a href="mailto:jromney@teltrust.com">jromney@teltrust.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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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.</div></blockquote><div><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>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 ...
<br><br>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.
<br><br></div><br></div><br>-- <br>Trixter <a href="http://www.0xdecafbad.com">http://www.0xdecafbad.com</a> Bret McDanel<br>Belfast +44 28 9099 6461 US +1 712 432 7999<br><a href="http://www.trxtel.com">http://www.trxtel.com
</a> the VoIP provider that pays you!