pay phone story

Name	R&C Private payphone
Date	Late 1990s.
Manufacturer	Taiwan Telecommunication Industry Co. (TTIC) and Tongya

The blue phone

This is a much more modern design (late 1990s to early 2000s).

Some clues:

• LCD display
• Membrane function keys (“MENU”, “HABLA”)
• Armoured handset cord
• Plastic security housing rather than cast aluminium
• “Multi Public Display” printed above the screen

The phrase “Multi Public Display” is not a brand—it’s almost certainly the model series. That wording appears on several Taiwanese export telephones.

The overall styling is remarkably similar to products sold by Taiwanese manufacturers such as Taiwan Telecommunication Industry Co. (TTIC) and Tongya, both of whom specialised in OEM payphones that were sold under local brands around the world. They produced coin, card, GSM and supervised payphones for export throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia

Development of the R&C Private payphone

Following the privatisation and deregulation of Mexico’s telecommunications market during the 1990s, numerous independent companies began operating supervised public payphones alongside the much larger Telmex network. Rather than installing expensive vandal-resistant street payphones, many private operators placed telephones inside shops, pharmacies, hotels, bus terminals and convenience stores where they could be monitored by staff. These supervised installations reduced theft and vandalism while allowing smaller companies to provide affordable public telephone services.

The two telephones shown are typical examples of these private supervised payphones. Although their exact manufacturer remains unconfirmed, both models closely resemble generic export payphones produced in Taiwan during the 1990s and early 2000s. Their moulded plastic housings, membrane keypads, LCD displays and modular electronics are characteristic of Taiwanese OEM manufacturers who supplied telecommunications equipment throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. These companies often sold identical telephones under whatever brand name the local operator requested.

The R&C logo appears to represent the operating company rather than the manufacturer. It was likely a regional Mexican telecommunications business or franchise that imported the telephones and operated them under its own name. While little documentation survives on R&C itself, these phones illustrate an important but often overlooked period in Mexico’s telecommunications history, when hundreds of small private operators supplemented Telmex’s nationwide network by providing convenient, supervised public telephone services in businesses across the country.

black phone- OEM export model

Probably early-mid 1990s. An OEM export model is a product manufactured by one company but designed to be sold under the brand name of another company.

It has:

• mechanical coin mechanism
• LED display window
• simple membrane keypad
• very inexpensive moulded housing

Again, it doesn’t resemble a Telmex design. It looks like an OEM export model that could have been sold under dozens of names.

Interestingly, Taiwan exported thousands of these types of “supervised payphones” where the operator collected the cash manually rather than relying on a secure coin vault.