| Nortel payphones | |
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| N233H 3 Slot Pay Phone | |
| QSD3A 3 Slot Pay Phone | |
| Centurion | |
Northern Telecom (from 1998 known as Nortel) manufactured several different payphone models. They were most commonly used in Canada and the United States. Nortel has manufactured several types in Canada.
Northern Electric, Nortel's previous name made chrome payphones in the 1950s. The same phone was also made by Western Electric.
Nortel Centurion were made in the 1970s–1980s and used coins only. They came in black, brown, blue, or green cases. Initial units used a rotary dial system and later units were touch tone key pad. Coin slot accepted denominations of 5, 10 and 25 cents. Centurions had a coin return button.
Centurion were used by Bell Canada, MTS, Telephone Milot and other local phone companies in Canada. Additionally, Centurions were used by companies in the United States such as Embarq, and a number of other independent telephone companies.
The Millennium line was introduced in the 1990s and allowed the use of coins (5, 10, 25 cents and 1 dollar for Canadian versions) and cards (credit card or phone cards as well as "smart" chip cards.) They were equipped with an advanced electronic coin validator, which could detect slugs or coin blockages. These units came with a touch tone key pad only. A display screen allowed the user to view the number dialed and switch between two languages, where the operating company has a choice of any combination of English, French, Spanish and Japanese. The VFD display also allows the operating company to set scrolling messages and ads, with a total of 20 messages possible in total, 10 for on hook and 10 for off hook. [1] [2] [3]
These units were used by:
Millennium phones require a CO line with polarity reversal for CDR (call detail record) purposes, as well as for coin return, hence these phones have no coin return button.
The rights to Millennium phones were sold to QuorTech when Nortel moved away from manufacturing phone devices, and were subsequently sold to WiMacTel. Quortech has all but disappeared from the public and in March 2014, WiMacTel announced they were the only operator of Millennium payphones in Canada and the US. [4]
The phones themselves are quite complex, using a Zilog Z180 processor with a number of peripherals attached. The whole point of the Millennium system was security and advanced monitoring. All Millennium phones connect to a server platform called Millennium Manager, which allows the operating company to control and monitor virtually every aspect of a phone. The phones 'call home' on a regular basis, uploading CDR records if they are full and reporting coinbox status (down to the amount of coins in a given denomination). The coin vault lock has a small micro switch that can detect break ins, which will cause the phone to call into the Millennium Manager with an alarm. The main housing lock also has a similar switch, which if triggered without entering the craft interface beforehand will trigger an alarm as well.
A Mondex version of the payphone was also produced, it has a special larger display with navigation keys. There is also an inmate version of the card only set, as well as a smaller deskset that used only a card reader. The desk set closely resembled a regular Meridian M7310 office phone. These smaller sets were often found in malls and hospitals.
The card readers were easily removed from the phone and often stolen and repurposed by hackers in systems like laundry machines and vending machines. Hackers found these readers could be adapted to a PC and then used to modify stored-value cards for small transactions, allowing them to bypass legitimate payment systems in various devices. This adaptability made the card readers a frequent target for theft and misuse.
These phones can sometimes be found on eBay for relatively cheap, though one cannot do much with them without the connection to the Millennium Manager. There are a few active projects which are trying to solve this problem however. [5]
Nortel Networks Corporation (Nortel), formerly Northern Telecom Limited, was a Canadian multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in Montreal, Quebec in 1895 as the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company, or simply Northern Electric. Until an antitrust settlement in 1949, Northern Electric was owned mostly by Bell Canada and the Western Electric Company of the Bell System, producing large volumes of telecommunications equipment based on licensed Western Electric designs.
A telephone card, calling card or phone card for short, is a credit card-size plastic or paper card used to pay for telephone services. It is not necessary to have the physical card except with a stored-value system; knowledge of the access telephone number to dial and the PIN is sufficient. Standard cards which can be purchased and used without any sort of account facility give a fixed amount of credit and are discarded when used up; rechargeable cards can be topped up, or collect payment in arrears. The system for payment and the way in which the card is used to place a telephone call vary from card to card.
A smart card (SC), chip card, or integrated circuit card, is a card used to control access to a resource. It is typically a plastic credit card-sized card with an embedded integrated circuit (IC) chip. Many smart cards include a pattern of metal contacts to electrically connect to the internal chip. Others are contactless, and some are both. Smart cards can provide personal identification, authentication, data storage, and application processing. Applications include identification, financial, public transit, computer security, schools, and healthcare. Smart cards may provide strong security authentication for single sign-on (SSO) within organizations. Numerous nations have deployed smart cards throughout their populations.
A Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) was a corporate entity created as result of the antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1974 and settled in the Modification of Final Judgment on January 8, 1982.
A red box is a phreaking device that generates tones to simulate inserting coins in pay phones, thus fooling the system into completing free calls. In the United States, a nickel is represented by one tone, a dime by two, and a quarter by a set of five. Any device capable of playing back recorded sounds can potentially be used as a red box. Commonly used devices include modified Radio Shack tone dialers, personal MP3 players, and audio-recording greeting cards.
A payphone is typically a coin-operated public telephone, often located in a telephone booth or in high-traffic public areas. Prepayment is required by inserting coins or telephone tokens, swiping a credit or debit card, or using a telephone card.
Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (iDEN) is a mobile telecommunications technology, developed by Motorola, which provides its users the benefits of a trunked radio and a cellular telephone. It was called the first mobile social network by many technology industry analysts. iDEN places more users in a given spectral space, compared to analog cellular and two-way radio systems, by using speech compression and time-division multiple access (TDMA).
Bell Canada is a Canadian telecommunications company headquartered at 1 Carrefour Alexander-Graham-Bell in the borough of Verdun, Quebec, in Canada. It is an ILEC in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec; as such, it was a founding member of the Stentor Alliance. It is also a CLEC for enterprise customers in the western provinces.
A telephone booth, telephone kiosk, telephone call box, telephone box or public call box is a tiny structure furnished with a payphone and designed for a telephone user's convenience; typically the user steps into the booth and closes the booth door while using the payphone inside.
A ringback number is a telephone number for a telephone line that automatically calls the line that the call was placed from, after the caller has hung up. The typical use of this facility is by telephone company technicians for testing a new installation or for trouble-shooting.
Phone fraud, or more generally communications fraud, is the use of telecommunications products or services with the intention of illegally acquiring money from, or failing to pay, a telecommunication company or its customers.
The DMS-100 is a member of the Digital Multiplex System (DMS) product line of telephone exchange switches manufactured by Northern Telecom. Designed during the 1970s and released in 1979, it can control 100,000 telephone lines.
Mondex was a smart card electronic cash system, implemented as a stored-value card and owned by Mastercard.
Nortel Meridian is a private branch exchange telephone switching system. It provides advanced voice features, data connectivity, LAN communications, computer telephony integration (CTI), and information services for communication applications ranging from 60 to 80,000 lines.
The Nortel Norstar, previously the Meridian Norstar, was a small and medium-sized business digital key telephone system introduced by Nortel and later sold to Avaya. It featured automatic call distribution, and supported up to 192 extensions. In the United Kingdom it was sold by British Telecom, rebadged as the BT Norstar.
Embarq Corporation was the largest independent local exchange carrier in the United States, serving customers in 18 states and providing local, long-distance, high-speed data and wireless services to residential and business customers. It had been formerly the local telephone division (LTD) of Sprint Nextel until 2006, when it was spun off as an independent company. Embarq produced more than $6 billion in revenues annually, and had approximately 18,000 employees. It was based in Overland Park, Kansas.
International telephone calls are those made between different countries. These telephone calls are processed by international gateway exchanges (switches). Charges for these calls were high initially but declined greatly during the 20th century due to advances in technology liberalization. Originally they were placed via long-distance operators. The calls were transmitted by cable, communications satellite, radio, and more recently, fiber optics and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). International direct dialling was introduced in the 1970s, so calls can be dialed by country code without an operator.
In Phreaking, the green box was a device whose function was to manipulate the coin collection mechanism of payphones. It employed three of the MF (multi-frequency) tones used in the blue box and could be viewed as a subset of that device.
A payment terminal, also known as a point of sale (POS) terminal, credit card machine, card reader, PIN pad, EFTPOS terminal, is a device which interfaces with payment cards to make electronic funds transfers. The terminal typically consists of a secure keypad for entering PIN, a screen, a means of capturing information from payments cards and a network connection to access the payment network for authorization.
The KX series of telephone boxes in the United Kingdom was introduced by BT in 1985. Following the privatisation of BT in 1984, the company decided to create a newly designed and improved take on the British telephone box, which at this point consisted of only red telephone boxes which BT had recently acquired, the most common being the iconic K6 box. These red boxes were considered flawed in parts by BT for several reasons, including cost, lack of ventilation, accessibility and maintenance. BT announced the £160 million series of new boxes, the KX series designed by GKN, as well as announcing the eventual replacement of all existing telephone boxes. The main telephone box in the KX range is the KX100. Upon launch, there were five models in total. The boxes were produced at a rate of 5,000 a year, with the total count of all BT-owned kiosks reaching 137,000 by 1999, a number which has since decreased by more than seventy per cent.