Do-It-Yourself Payphones or Netphones?

Controlio asks: "With the explosion of cell phones, pay phones are disappearing quickly. I work in a large sports venue that seats over 60,000 - but has only 5 pay phones. The problem is the rent on those 5 phones is ridiculous - we net a loss of over $150 per phone per month. Its a great convenience for the public, but it'd be cheaper for us to have people stand in the middle of the stadium with cell phones saying "here, make a call for free." We have a great deal of both telephone and internet capabilities - we're a brand new facility and have far more than adequate data and voice pipes to our building. The question, is how can one roll their own payphone service? Has anyone done this? Where can you purchase equipment? What are the technical ramifications if we want to stay basic or get complicated with things like TTY or internet phones? Does VoIP or POTS make more sense? Any advice on where to get started?"

You want a Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephone

[outlier]

Look around for "customer owned coin operated telephones" (COCOTs). You can buy your own payphone -- no need to rent, but they are a favorite target of phreakers...

A quick google search came up with this [payphoneoutlet.com]

Payphones & Profit

[duffbeer703]

Are concepts that do not exist together.

Payphones were originally (way back) introduced so that people without a personal telephone available to them could make or receive calls from businesses or people who did. They were the 1910 equivilent of NetZero.

They never made a signifigant operating profit for the phone company, but encouraged people get an use telephones.

As a payphone owner, you should never expect to see a pay telephone as a potential profit center. You can, however, use it to steer its customers towards the concession stands selling $6 cups of sugared water and program salesmen.

Buy some of these...

[vaderhelmet]

payphones [payphoneproducts.com] and run it all yourself. Sure, for a several of them, you're gonna rack up a decent bill, but for where you work, it should be no sweat, and after the phone bill, it's all profit. Plus, you're doing the right thing.
ooooooooo looky! Some of them even come with a port for you to plug in your laptop. and some come with credit card readers to pay for calls. Options, options, options!!!!

Also try here [payphonedirect.com], here [payphone.com], here [yahoo.com] and there's always some good old Googling [google.com]!!! Good luck on your journey to payphone bliss.