The brewery down the beach has an old phone booth out front. They said, ‘We do want to restore it but I don’t know if service will ever be restored.’ The statement is unclear as to whether they can have it restored, or maybe won’t have it restored.
Will a phone company restore service to an old pay phone? I can’t think of a reason they wouldn’t, but I thought I’d ask.
Restore plain old telephone service? Yes. Make it a fully functiononal coin operated device like we remember from 30 years ago? I doubt it.
For a wired payphone to work, a lot of things need to happen.
Assuming the instrument itself works, the cabling it’s connected to has to be in good shape, connected to a working back office switch, and provisioned into the company’s network.
If the phone will be used as an actual payphone, the company will have to be arrange to collect whatever change accumulates in the phone, or convert the phone into a card-swipe device with the correct card clearing services. Plus set up accounting for that device’s service and revenues.
Seems like a lot. AFAIK, most landline pay phones have no service because their telcos dropped it as not cost effective. Beancounting is usually an insurmountable barrier.
I presume it was once someone’s job to periodically drive around town and collect money from payphones. Those people, assuming they ever existed, are now long gone, so how does the phone company get paid for calls that are made? Asking for a credit card to make a 25 cent phone call doesn’t make much sense to me.
I have an old payphone. Cleophus and Elindsey said they could with much work and funds it could be made to work. I might have asked them to do it, but I haven’t had a land line for years.
Absolutely. Unsurprisingly, the job title (for Pacific Bell, anyway) was Coin Collector Technician.
That was the other problem- I don’t have the key to the coinbox. We would either need a key, an expert lockpicker, or just drill the lock out.
Are we talking about hooking up a payphone to a land line?
I’ve seen a pay phone at the Los Galanes restuarant in Mexican Town Detroit and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people using it.
I feel the need to stress that I came by my payphone legally. I bought it at a toy and collectibles show. I’m certain that the dealer I got it from rescued it from the trash. If I did want to get it up and running again, I might avail myself of that site. Thanks.
Since some cities have ripped all the public phone booths out, not sure if they would, but you can always turn it into a private pay phone.
eg
A guy a couple of blocks from me has a pay phone mounted on a pole in front of his house. He somehow hooked it up to his ethernet network and it works via VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol.) The phone is completely functional, and since phone calls are basically free using that service, anybody can make a call on that phone.
We have a payphone in our basement acquire legally from some company. It works but doesn’t take coins. I’m not sure how it works as it has a dial and we have touch tone service.
Nortel manufactured these back in the 90s, Bell Canada installed these widely just as cell phones were becoming more common.
They’re backward compatible. Modern phone lines properly interpret the pulses from the old spinny dials.
Not necessarily. Around here, the phone company is in the process of discontinuing POTS. Or maybe they’ve already finished discontinuing it; I haven’t been following too closely, because I’ve bee cell-only for a long time now.
I thought I read somewhere this is not true. Which is too bad, since I have a dial phone somewhere that would be fun to hook up.
Decode the pulses into anything you want using a cheap microcontroller:
https://www.mattmillman.com/projects/building-your-own-pulse-to-tone-converter/