Single-Slot Payphones

Single-slot payphones commonly (but not always) use a “fortress” housing, designed to be more tamper and vandal resistant than the housing used in 3-slot phones.

Fortress phones are commonly broken into two distinct types: Western Electric (or simply Western) style and GTE/Automatic Electric/Quadrum style. These can be differentiated by the location of the coin slot as Western Electric style phones had the coin slot on the left side of the phone’s face and GTE/Automatic Electric/Quadrum phones have the coin slot on the right side.

As the names would suggest, Western style phones were deployed by Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), descendants of the original Bell Telephone (which included Western Electric) while the GTE style phones were used by GTE and other independents. Over time this distinction would become more muddled, especially when RBOC Bell Atlantic would merge with GTE to form Verizon in 2000. This resulted in a heterogeneous payphone fleet consisting of both phone types.

While the origin of these phone types were from phone companies operating them on coin lines, the housings would often later be repurposed for COCOTs with many companies offering drop-in replacement boards to convert traditional payphones over. Further, many COCOT companies would go on to manufacture their own housings in the GTE style to sell a complete payphone. Genuine GTE payphone housings are usually distinguished by the coin return lever sitting under the coin slot while clones will have it to the side.

Single-Slot payphones can be separated again into two further classifications: Coin line (or “dumb”) phones and COCOTs (Customer-Owned Coin Operated Telephones or “smart” phones).

Coin Line Phones

Coin line phones (Also known as LEC, or Local Exchange Carrier phones ) are phones that were operated by “the telephone company” and used a phone line specially provisioned for payphones. Call cost (also known as call rating) as well as coin collection/return actions were performed at the Central Office and the payphone was little more than a terminal with no intelligence of its own, hence being called “dumb.”

There are 3 large players in this category in North America: Western Electric (also called Bell, or WECo), Automatic Electric/GTE (also called AE), and Northern Electric/Northern Telecom (also called Nortel). Though these phones were created by different companies, they function similarly.

COCOTs (Customer-Owned Coin Operated Telephones

COCOTs on the other hand could be operated by anyone and utilized normal subscriber phone lines. Since someone operating a COCOT didn’t have the backing of a traditional telephone company, the payphone itself needed to perform all of the call rating and coin collection/return logic itself. These phones have what are essentially small computers inside them that handle all of this logic, hence being called “smart.”