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?"

Dont rent Buy!

[BrookHarty]

Why rent when you can buy, payphones are dirt cheap. Check out Payphone.com [payphone.com] They have models for starting at 299. You can get payphones at local auctions too, for half the price. (How much is your rent at a $150 a month loss per phone?!)

Thou I like the idea of VoIP, try to keep things simple when dealing with the public. Heck, if you really just want to play with technology, get a premade kiosk for 6K that supports VoIP and see if you turn a profit. (Thou at a stadium, who wants to surf the net when the game is on...)

You forgot something

[fm6]

There are a bunch of sites offering to sell payphones and related hardware to would-be COCOT operators. But nowhere can I find out how much it costs to actually get a dial tone. The site you link to has a fancy table citing "revenue", but nothing about expenses.

Since Controlio has neglected to mention how much his present setup costs before he accounts for revenue (Ask Slashdots are painfully sparse on details these days!), we don't know whether he's paying too much for his pay phones, or just not getting any revenue. I suspect he's hoping that magic technology can provide him with phone service for a nominal cost. Which is silly. A business phone line costs $60/mo or so. I doubt if you can get any kind of fixed-point connectivity, be it POTS or IP or whatever, for any less. And in most cases, probably a lot more.

Look into regulations

[ComputerSlicer23]

I worked for a small company at one point, that was the POP for a bunch of dialup equipment for an ISP based in another city 60 miles away. Since they had dedicated T1 equipment between their two sites, and the expertise to setup voice lines between the two, they setup a voice line that could make a long distance call over their lines for free. They made it available to all of the employees who worked for our small company. A lot of our employees commuted from one city to the other, which is how we ended up with their equipment in our space. One of the owners commuted, and at one point nearly became a partner in the ISP, but instead he just put the equipment in our racks.

Well, it turns out that, if you over phone service to anyone, even for free, especially long distance, guess what, you have to pay various taxes. Even if you don't make the customer pay, your still have to pay the taxes to the local and state gov'ts.

So in the end, you'll end up doing more paperwork, crapola then it's worth to setup your own phone service over your own phone lines. So your options are pay the phone company to run them for you, or pay them to provide the lines you hook up to your own phone. I'm not sure what the cost of buying a pay phone is, or what the cost of a business phone in your are is (it's about $50-75 a month here). So if you think the phones will average less then $75-$100 a month in damage, it's a win to own your own phones. If you think they will average more then that, it's a losing proposition to own your own.

Personally, if it was a fixed cost $150 a month, they have to replace damanged phones, your absolutely nuts not to take them up on it. About the only options are to not provide phones at all, or to literally let them use one of your phones, either a cell, or a land line based in an office.

Kirby

Work something out with one of the cell phone co's

[GreenKiwi]

talk to Verizon, AT&T, etc. and work out a deal with them where you/they provide such cell phone services. They get good advertising... you get cheap phones....

Get some advertising revenue?

[Smitty825]

This may be a good place to get the advertising dept. involved. If you could get a local cell phone carrier to "advertise their service/phones/whatever" at the game by providing free calls to customers (or calls and internet) at each event. You may even be able to make a profit on this service!