Much depends on the vintage of your telco’s equipment. That can vary dramatically. Some have quite old kit that provides backwards compatibility. Here in Australia there is diminishing support for any form of conventional telephony. The majority of houses have migrated to broadband connections and either there is no copper in the ground or it is used for last mile internet. Phones are exclusively VOIP, and many of us don’t even bother to connect a phone to a VOIP port, and just use out mobile phones. Calls have become essentially free, so there is no incentive for a landline. (And VOIP doesn’t provide much of a safety net in the event of an emergency or power outage.)
Years ago I think you could buy adapters that converted pulse dialing to tone. Big disadvantage is that there is no # or *.
There are still some of the iconic red phone boxes still working in the UK. 80% are gone though leaving about 20,000. Many of the rural ones have been converted to libraries, art galleries and defibrillators.
There are a lot of pay-phone-like solutions but could you get one to operate exactly like it did in the 1980’s like needing coins to open up a line to the exchange, deposit more coins for more time, etc.
Yes. The Millennium payphone was the standard pay phone in the Greater Toronto Area. They were never updated to accept the two-dollar coin though. It always felt odd passing one with a pocket of toonies and knowing they wouldn’t work there.
I THINK there are some left in the Toronto subway, as a safety feature, but I could be wrong.
Yes- for the payphones owned by the phone company. But there was another kind owned by the business that hosted it - I mainly remember seeing them in hair salons. It was usually a countertop phone in my memory, not a wall phone. The business could receive calls but customers and employees had to pay to make calls. The phone company billed the business which emptied the coin box.
I remember the banks of phones down there in the 80s and 90s and having to walk past a number of them to find an available phone to respond to a message on my pager.
I remember seeing a phone that might have been like that at a Kinko’s copy shop. It was a desk phone but it accepted cards and had kind of the same styling as the Millennium phone.
Searching returns images of wall pay phones and hotel-room phones, but nothing seems to match. Maybe I am misremembering.
