Payphone

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Verizon payphone on a street corner in the Eastern United States (typical)

GTE Automatic Electric 120-type single-slot coin phone in Santa Monica, CA (2004)

Toronto payphones covered with graffiti and bills.

Japanese Public IC TEL

A payphone or pay phone is a public telephone, with payment by inserting money (usually coins) or a debit card (a special telephone card or a multi-purpose card) or credit card before a call is made. Some telephone companies have termed them, and tried (unsuccessfully) to get the public to identify them as "coin phones", because the term "pay phone" may imply that other phones are free.

Payphones that accept coins have been largely discontinued in some places, due to the high occurrence of damage to the payphone caused by attempted theft of the money, vandalism, usage by drug dealers, or bodily fluids. However the primary reason that payphones are being discontinued is the sharp decline in use due to the ubiquitous usage of cell phones.

Payphones are often found in public places, transportation hubs such as airports or train stations, and on street corners. In some cases payphones are mounted in drive-up structures in which people in automobiles could make calls while still in their vehicles. The abandonment of payphones by telephone companies has angered some people who consider them a communication staple for low-income and low-credit consumers.

In recent years, deregulation has made possible payphone service provided by a variety of companies. Such telephones are called customer-owned coin-operated telephones (COCOT), and are often found in a state of moderate to severe disrepair when compared with a payphone owned and operated by the local telephone company. One common implementation is commonly operated by vending machine companies and contains a hardwired list of non-toll telephone exchanges to which it will complete calls. All payphones on the street and in buildings in Japan are exclusively installed and maintained by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT).

In the United States, the coin rate for a local direct-dialed station-to-station call from a payphone has been 50¢ in most areas since mid-2001, for an unlimited number of minutes. Previously, the charge had been per minute, or per number of minutes. During the 1960s and 1970s, the same call in the United States and Canada typically cost 10¢. In inflation adjusted terms, in 2006 USD, this was 68¢ in 1960, and 28¢ in 1979. While some areas only cost 5¢, smaller companies occasionally charged as high as 15¢ to 20¢. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, this price gradually changed to 20¢, and again rose to 25¢ in some areas between 1985 and 1990 (47¢-39¢, inflation adjusted terms as above). In the late 1990s, the price rose to 35¢ in many areas.

In the United States, a payphone operator collects an FCC-mandated fee of 49.4¢ from the owner of a toll-free number for each call successfully placed to that number from the payphone. This results in many toll-free numbers rejecting calls from payphones in an attempt to avoid this surcharge; calling cards which require the caller to dial through a toll-free number will often pass this surcharge back to the caller, either as a separate itemized charge, a 50¢ to 90¢ increase in the price of the call, or (in the case of many pre-paid calling cards) the deduction of an extra number of minutes from the balance of the pre-paid card.