Phone booths as payment machines (Telefónica case study) (July 20, 2009)

It always interests me what kind of different telecom-related services are invented in different countries, so when travelling I always look around for something new. During my last trip to Barcelona I noticed very interesting thing related to phone booths in the city — they all feature the Telefónica’s advertisement begging you not to let your prepaid mobile account run dry. What’s so special? Well, it seems like it’s possible to top-up the Movistar phone (Movistar is the mobile division of Telefónica) using the phone booth. You dial a special free number in the booth (and they are on every corner across the city), enter your mobile number and drop coins in — voila!

This scheme is of course hardly possible when fixed lines operator and mobile operator do not belong to the same company. However, Verizon and AT&T in the US, O2 (being still close to BT) in UK, and a bunch of operators worldwide could reimplement this useful 24×7 payment service.