Phone Cards

A telephone card, calling card or phone card for short, is a small card, usually resembling a credit card, used to pay for telephone services. Such cards can either employ prepaid credit system or credit card style system of credit. more...

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The exact system for payment, and the way in which the card is used to place a phone call, depend on the overall telecommunication system. Currently, the most common types of telephone cards involve pre-paid credit in which the card is purchased with a specific balance, from which the cost of calls made is deducted. Pre-paid phone cards are disposable. When the balance is exhausted you simply buy a new card. Cards purchased online can often be refilled. The other main type of card involves a card with a special PIN printed on it that allows one to charge calls to a land-line telephone account.

There are principally two core technologies for phonecards: stored-value and remote memory.

Stored-value phone cards

In stored value, called so because the card itself contains the balance available. The balance is read by the public pay-phone machine when it is inserted into the machine's card reader. This is similar to an automated teller machine at a bank. There are several ways in which the value can be encoded on the card.

The earliest system used a magnetic stripe as information carrier, similar to the technology of ATMs and key cards. It was issued in 1976 in Italy, manufactured by SIDA.

The next technology used optical storage. Optical phonecards get their name from visible marks left on the card, such as holes or lines, so that the card reader scans for such marks and determines the balance on the card. Optical cards, such as ones made by Landis & Gyr and Anritsu, were popular early phonecards in many countries. Such technology is quite simple and easily hackable, thus for security reasons, among others, optical phonecards have been steadily phased out around the world. Optical phonecards are still in use in several countries, perhaps most notably in Japan.

The third sub-system of stored value phonecards is chip cards, first launched on a large scale in France in 1986 by France Telecom. Many other countries followed suit, including Ireland in 1990 and the UK circa 1994-1995, which phased out the old green Landis & Gyr cards in favor of more colorful smart cards. The initial microchips were easy to hack, but by the mid-to-late 1990s, highly secure technology aided the spread of chip phonecards worldwide.

Remote memory systems

Telephone accounts symbolized by a card

The second main technology of phonecards is remote memory, which uses a toll or toll-free access number to reach the database and check for balance on product. As the United States did not ever have a single nationalized telephone service (or even the same firm for every state), and with the deregulation of its major ones, there was no incentive to be consistent with the rest of the world. The ease of use of sliding a card into a machine just as in a teller machine was countered by fears of vandalism of the machines.

Read more at Wikipedia.org