Telephone Cards and Modern Society

It's arduous to imagine current world of communications without prepaid phone cards. In this period began intensive development of prepaid phone cards throughout world particularly in the U.S.A. After this period phone cards started to apply all over the world. In our days the point reached 200 states throughout the world.

In this text you'll find info about evolving of phone cards since 1970 to our times. In 1975 the telephone companies have faced the obstacle of dearth of coins and of robbery in the pay telephone systems.

The way out of riddle proposed the supplier of vending machines, which invented cheap phone cards to New Zealand from Switzerland. SIDA was the first firm that proposed this technology.

The first country which began to use prepaid calling cards was Italy in 1976. In 1977 the number of countries which used prepaid calling cards significantly increased, among them: Austria, France, Sweden and United Kingdom. These cards made possible to get rid of the many problems, and so they rapidly became popular among the users, soon the rest of Europe started to utilize phone cards. Already in 1982, phone cards were used in different parts of the world. Prepaid telephone cards emerged in Asia.

There was found an interesting application to telephone cards Japan, they apply them in Subway. In 1987 these international calling card began to be utilized in Western world. The first firms which presented magstripes technology were Siemens and General Electric Company. In our days, magstripes are utilized in almost all types of phone cards.

The world of phone cards was entered by AT&T, a big telecommunication firm, in 1989. This corporation started to introduce services connected with calling cards, first to Hawaii and than they acquainted other part of U.S with these cards. In the year 1990 calling cards began to be used with magnetic stripes technology. The growth of prepaid phone cards began to rise during this period. The new level of protection appeared in Western world it was first PIN number, also long distance calls and another services.

In 1992 all basic and leading telecommunication establishment began to manufacture phone cards. Not only big communication corporations understood the profit of creating phone cards but also little companies started to create the phone cards of their own. Sales were doubled during only two years, because of incredible demand and big interest, they achieved mark of twelve million dollars. An incredible jump in sales in 1993, when the mark achieved 25 million US dollars, has caused interest of main corporations to phone cards.

In 1995 prepaid phone cards with embedded chips replaced the cards with magstripes technique. New invention caused tremendous growing of sellings and they reached 650 million dollars.

Year 2000 and onwards the sales reached billions of dollars. In our days the calling cards include a wide range of services, amid them: online phone cards, international phone cards, IP communication, fax and many other attendances.