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Calling Card History

The first phone card was introduced in Italy in 1976 by a pay phone operator, SIDA, who created a magnetic stripe card to use in their phones instead of change. They were originally created as a way of dealing with the on going coin shortage problem and the vandalism of pay phones. They also created an easy way to make phone calls from a pay phone without change.

Since the invention of phone cards, calling card companies continuously worked to improve the quality. However, United States was behind in calling cards industry. Even though phone cards have floated around Europe and even in Japan for years but did not come to the United States until World Telecom Group introduced them in 1987. Distributed by GE and Siemens they were magnetic stripe cards and were upgraded version of the initial phone card. In 1989, AT&T introduced their own calling card and the product really started to hit the mainstream market.

A year later NY Bell released their own calling card that was the first of it's kind in the US where the user dialed an access number and entered the pin printed on the card (turned out to be the most popular form of calling card). Over the next few years all of the major telecom companies followed suit and released their own cards.

By 1993 the calling card market in the US was generating 25 million annually and most of the companies by this time had dropped the magnetic stripe technology and switched to the access number and pin format. And the growth did not stop there; in 1995, the phone card business in the US had grown to a 650 million dollar business and by the close of 2000 it was around a 3 billion.

The market continues today and while more ethnically focused than before continues to bring in billions of dollars a year.

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