Wireless Pay Phones

Wireless and Internet technology are changing the pay phone as we know it.

The payphone, which has changed little in its 100-year history, is not escaping the wireless and Internet revolutions. Ask a telecommunications official from Ghana to recall how many pay phones were in the country in 1998. The answer: 35. Thirty-two were located in the capital city of Accra. Today, there are more than 200 payphones, and the number is growing. When Ghana decided to modernize its telecommunications infrastructure, it determined that wireless pay phones were the quickest, least-expensive way to offer national phone service.

The wireless pay phone is not only making an impact in Ghana and other developing countries, but also in major metropolitan areas such as New York. Independent phone-service providers in New York are installing wireless pay-phone kiosks. These phones avoid the enormous outlays for installing landline networks. In addition, the kiosks are an important vehicle for advertising, thus generating extra revenue for providers.

Industry executives expect the pay phone will evolve from a voice-only device to a multifunctional communications medium capable of sending and receiving not only sound, but video, still images, data and text. Wireless pay phones equipped with WAP will enable people to access the Internet for news, stock prices and flight time tables.

The potential of wireless pay phones was first spotted in developing countries where huge investments were needed to bring basic communications services to rural areas. The ability of wireless technology to span large geographic areas without the cost of burying cable made financial sense. Existing cellular networks can be financially leveraged - considering that the cost of "super imposing" a wireless pay-phone system, running from $1,000 to $2,000 per unit, is relatively negligible compared to the cost of burying cable.

The world's largest wireless payphone system is in Mexico. Swiss based pay-phone manufacturer Ascom, working with Telmex, the national-service provider, installed more than 15,000 wireless payphones throughout the country. The Ascom phones work with a wireless network that brings services to centralized telecenters in villages nationwide without the expense of laying cable and wire into remote areas. The phones can be configured to accept a wide variety of cards. In addition to wireless payphones, Ascom delivered a pay-phone-management system that is capable of handling more than 400,000 payphones and offers security and automatic software upgrades.

In addition to expanded coverage, the system allows TelCel, a wholly owned subsidiary of Telmex, to have an advantage over new wireless competitors.

"The rural telephone project will bring millions of people into the national network, many of whom will use a phone for the first time," said Gilles Gauthier, Ascom product manager-GSM payphones.

The current teledensity in Mexico (phone-lines per 100 persons) is 10.

Recently, wireless pay phones have found a lucrative market in major metropolitan cities, especially where competition is high. New service providers see wireless pay phones as a way to expand their wireless business by adding public access to their wireless networks. Non-cellular-phone owners can buy prepaid cellular airtime cards and place calls over the wireless network from public wireless payphones.

Wireless is faster and less costly to deploy. New wireless- and telephone-service providers can avoid the huge expense of digging up streets and burying cable.

"Anytime when the cost of deploying new service is high, wireless is always more economic," said Michael Boyle, Elcotel Telecommunications president.

Feature-Future Perfect
With wireless payphones seeing increasing use around the world, vendors are aggressively adding new features. For many years, a service provider's choices for wireless payphones were restricted by the air interface to which a particular supplier designed its products and the needs of a specific geographic region. Now, suppliers such as Ascom, Elcotel and Intellicall offer systems where the air interface can be changed easily to support the analog and digital wireless standards including GSM, CDMA and AMPS/D. The phones are becoming smarter and more functional. Besides accepting all types of payment options from coins to smart debit cards, Intellicall's Astratel 15135-DP offers a data port that is integrated through the card reader panel in the front housing. Call processing is secured via a customer-defined rate table that allows calls only to user-programmed telephone numbers. Calls to numbers not contained in this table aren't processed, removing the possibility of fraud. The 15135-DP pay phone also allows service providers to limit the length of a data call. The 2-line, 20-character VFD provides patrons with operational instructions.

"Business travelers are demanding data-port access — pay phones equipped with data ports can now serve as 'remote offices' for travelers, enabling them to monitor business developments through e-mail and voice communications," said John McDonald, Intellicall president.

Newer wireless payphones also offer more user-friendly features such as multilingual displays, audio prompts and speed-dial buttons.

Vendors are devising ways to protect against the serious problem of fraud. In areas where a high degree of security is required, Ascom's family of PMS call-management systems constantly monitor lines. Communications between PMS and the pay phone are encoded and secured using over-voice frequency signals.

Preventing fraud is high on the priority list for service providers. In the United States, losses related to fraud total nearly $5 billion according to Telecom & Security Review.

There's a shift in the pay-phone market away from coin collection, toward value-added services as the primary driver of revenue. Intellicall's N-Genius switch-based service platform provides prepaid-wireless services. The N-Genius can be connected to any existing wireless network via digital E1 or T1 trunks to enable cellular and PCS providers to offer a prepaid-airtime service to subscribers who either do not qualify for traditional service or have not subscribed because of fear of high monthly bills. To use the prepaid service, a cellular or PCS user just dials a destination number. The phone call is routed to the N-Genius system for handling the call. Prepaid cellular calls are debited from the user's account on a real-time basis with respect to airtime charges.

In Canada, the Canada Pay Phone is installing 45,000 Grapevine network terminals and e-Prism software from Elcotel, which tailors advertising messages and future sponsor-paid content for each individual terminal. The network terminals combine traditional pay-phone capabilities with sponsor-paid advertising and content, e-commerce and personalized information services from the Internet. It was developed under a sponsor-paid business model that will allow service providers to enhance revenue potential while reducing operating expenses and to enable sponsors to deliver their messages to targeted audiences. The terminals and back-office software are based on Microsoft's Windows NT and Windows CE platforms. In addition, e-Prism is designed to offer full service capabilities, including reports on usage, effectiveness and measurement tools for sponsor-paid content.

Future Tense
Wireless pay phones will be a central technology for providers. Within a few years, they will become increasingly multifunctional. New Web pay phones are already on the market. They allow Web browsing, sending and receiving e-mail and enhanced directory service including mapping and directions to a specific location. But these services are not yet available on wireless systems because of bandwidth limitations.

To get around this problem, wireless phones will be WAP-enabled. Clearly, the pay phone as we know it is a relic of the past. The wireless payphone of tomorrow will give the phrase, "something to phone home about" a whole new meaning.