Many RBOCs have been retro-fitting traditional "looking" payphones
> originally made by AT&T's Western Electric, and many independent LECs
> have been retro-fitting their traditional "looking" Automatic Electric
> payphones and Northern Telecom traditional Centurian payphones, with
> internal "smart-chips".
Part of the extended divestiture broohahahahaha was that the local telcos had to provide the same "equal access" for coin operated payphones to customer-owned equipment as they did to their own house brands.
This was way, way, too messy on many levels.
At least in NY, and I suspect just about everywhere else, the local telco simply ended that type of access years ago and replaced their own phones (the internal guts, so to speak) with COCOT type "smart" circuitry.
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