Building an amateur payphone network in Philadelphia.
We’re happy to announce a new ROM swapping service for Nortel Millennium phones in conjunction with RandTel and others in the community! Do you own a Nortel Millennium payphone and want your phone to work like a normal landline phone that can take/make calls with no coins and no other special equipment running? Did you know that the software currently in your phone may not be recovered/known yet…
Our next phone is coming along nicely and a lot more work has been done since our last update! Let’s dive into some of the work that’s been done and what’s left to accomplish. When running a phone line up to the vintage phone booth, we noticed that the old cloth-covered AC wiring on top was deteriorating and needed to be replaced. Original booth wiring. Luckily we have a friend Lou who is an…
At a recent Telephone Collectors International show in Hicksville, NY , we stumbled upon a beautiful Western Electric L1AMP dual-gong external ringer that was a must-have for our upcoming second phone installation. While the phone for that installation, a Western Electric 236G, has an added ringer in the coin vault, we don’t know the provenance of it and if it is even meant to be used with a…
A few months ago we learned that a beautiful antique wooden phone booth was just salvaged from the sunroom of a grand old Victorian mansion in Germantown, Philadelphia. It’s a classic wooden phone booth of the type that the Bell Telephone System deployed tens of thousands of nationwide until about 70 years ago. It has the classic wood and glass folding French door to allow private conversation, a…
The below is an April Fools Day post. Hopefully you find it as funny as we did! FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Verizon Acquires PhilTel, Reentering the Payphone Market and Strengthening Community Connectivity Philadelphia, PA – April 1 2025 – Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), a leading global telecommunications provider, today announced the acquisition of PhilTel, a Philadelphia-based telephone…
Earlier this year we released our public Protel payphone programming line , and today we’re adding another way people can connect to it. Now, the programming line will also be available over SIP, so anyone can directly connect to our PBX and access the line. Connection details are as follows: Server: programming.philtel.org Port: 16556 Username: protel Password: protel Codec(s): ulaw The context…
This post is a continuation in a series, “Fixing a Protel Payphone.” To view the previous installment, check out Fixing a Protel Payphone Part 4: XNet Config With XNet now configured, the last step was to take care of the connection between the phone and the modem. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem as I can usually take an ATA or two and configure them on my Asterisk PBX and things work without…
This post is a continuation in a series, “Fixing a Protel Payphone.” To view the previous installment, check out Fixing a Protel Payphone Part 3: Modem Repair Now that ExpressNet is installed and a modem is in working order, the next step to getting XNet running was actually configuring it. Much of the below was accomplished with the help of Peter and his great documentation on Protel programming…
This post is a continuation in a series, “Fixing a Protel Payphone.” To view the previous installment, check out Fixing a Protel Payphone Part 2: Installing ExpressNet The next step to getting XNet running was connecting up the modem. Protel actually produced their own modem, the UPMS 1200, which was designed specifically to program payphones via XNet. Many people online stated that in order to…
This post is a continuation in a series, “Fixing a Protel Payphone.” To view the previous installment, check out Fixing a Protel Payphone Part 1: Getting Dial Tone Initially, I attempted to program the phone with call cost rates via the keypad according to some programming instructions I found online targeted at the Protel CTR201 series boards. There is a handy programming quick reference…