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Vintage Telephony and Telecomms Vintage Telephones, Telephony and Telecomms Equipment |
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20th Jul 2020, 12:26 am | #21 |
Dekatron
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Greater Manchester, UK.
Posts: 18,724
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Re: Phonecard payphones
So true
From what I read, the official replacement for card-phones in prison is a system where each prisoner has a unique PIN which gives him access to a list of pre-authorised numbers.
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21st Jul 2020, 1:38 am | #22 |
Heptode
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: High Wycombe, Bucks. UK.
Posts: 811
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Re: Phonecard payphones
There's an article about BT Prison Phonecards here:
http://www.telephonecardcollector.co...phonecards.htm They were modified so that ordinary public phone cards could not be smuggled in and used in prison payphones. I'm not sure what was different about them. Another oddity: When BT first introduced phonecards in the 1980s, they were optical. A strip containing a hologram was scanned by a laser in the payphone, which burnt away the strip as the credit was used. Thus cards could not be re-credited; it was pretty much fraud-proof. But in 1995, BT started trialling smartcard phonecards (chip-based) first in Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. The trial was successful and the new chip cards and payphones (made by Schlumberger) were rolled out nationwide, eventually replacing the Landis & Gyr optical cardphones. Yet even before 1995, smart cards used for viewing satellite TV had already been 'hacked'. Why did BT want to switch to a less secure system? I notice the prison payphones never made the switch. No smart chip phonecards appear to have been issued to HM prisons. Another thing I noticed was that the new chip phonecards had expiry dates printed on them, whereas the optical ones did not. In any case, the chip phonecards were rather short-lived due to arrival of cheap pay-as-you-go mobile phones at the beginning of this century. |