[VoIP] CAMA and UK billing

[Donald Froula]

I also recall the pay phones had a chute one could
fill with the shilling coins. Each meter pulse would
collect one coin. I once called back to the US using
coins. The pulses came so fast I literally could not
feed the coins in fast enough to keep the chute
filled. It was impossible to keep the "buffer" filled!

Don

--- Donald Froula <dfroula at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> I remember working in a CO near the central telecom
> tower in Vienna in 1983 and seeing a man go in to
> the
> meter room with a camera. I followed him in. He
> showed
> me the tape on the floor that marked where he placed
> the camera tripod. Another clerk with a jewlers
> loupe
> read the meters and generated the billing. I
> remember
> being amazed at the brute force simplicity of it
> all!
> 
> Don
> 
> --- Jonathan Kay <g4vft at btinternet.com> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Did CAMA produce fully itemised bills for the
> > customers ?
> >   Just been reading how the CLI was generated in
> XB5
> > offices on 
> > Wikipedia, it's amazing what steam powered
> > technology could do.
> > Yes, we had subs. meters all right. Trunk dialling
> > and international 
> > just resulted in faster and faster application of
> > units onto the meters.
> >  The coin and fee check relay sets, which
> controlled
> > pay on answer 
> > payphones, actually had a relay labelled "TBF" If
> an
> > international call 
> > was metering "Too Bloody Fast" for the set to
> > function within it's 
> > design parameters, this would operate and cut off
> > the call.
> >  In the tiny exchanges, we had to manually read
> > meters each month. The 
> > larger places had a girl who come along from
> > accounts, to photograph the 
> > meters. She had a camera with a four sided "horn"
> on
> > the front which 
> > covered 100 meters at a time.
> >  
> >  Jon
> > 
> > 
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