forrette@cory.berkeley.edu (Steve Forrette) (01/07/91)
I've not seen this one before. It looks very much like the blue AT&T coinless phones that they often have at airports or highway rest stops in the middle of nowhere. No screen or card reader, just the dialing pad and receiver. This one looked very much like the AT&T one, in fact, I wasn't sure until I tried to dial 10288, which after about the 2, resulted in "This is not a valid number." Looking closer, the logo on the upper left corner looks much like the Pacific Bell asterisk, except there are only five points instead of six. I didn't fiddle with it any further. It was at the Taco Bell (I didn't realize the humor in this until just now! :-)) in Mt. Verde, Arizona, which really is in the middle of nowhere. [Moderator's Note: There are some COCOTS here which require a careful examination to detirmine that they are not 'genuine Bell'. So how come if their 'alternate service' is so good they have to try so hard to decieve the public to make them think it is a Bell phone? PAT]
cowan@uunet.uu.net (John Cowan) (01/11/91)
In <15896@accuvax.nwu.edu> our esteemed Moderator wrote: >There are some COCOTS here which require a careful >examination to determine that they are not 'genuine Bell'. Here in New York City, there exist COCOTs that are >identical< to New York Telephone payphones, except that they don't say "New York Telephone" on the rate card or elsewhere on the phone. I suspect they are reconditioned models that NYT sold as scrap. What's worse, not every NYT payphone (especially those inside in odd locations, some of which actually still have rotary dials!) is marked "New York Telephone", although most are. So there is truly no way to be safe except to search every payphone and refuse to use any that aren't marked NYT. That excludes some usable ones, but is the only method guaranteed to reject all zero-armed bandits.