pay phone story

Payphone Story – Global History of Payphones and Phone Booths

Russian Payphone- Ascom GNT-807 payphone

The Ascom GNT-807 was a rugged chip-card payphone widely used during the 1990s and early 2000s. It became particularly common in Russia after Ascom entered the market in 1994. The Russian GNT-807 RUS was officially certified and became an iconic post-Soviet street phone, even appearing in the film Brother.

Name	Ascom GNT-807 payphone
Date	1988–2010
Manufacturer	Ascom Nordic A/S of Denmark
Link	Additional information at Moscow based payphone museum website- https://amt69.ru/
	Link- GNT-502 as used in Sweden

GNT 807 PAYPHONES (1988–2010)

The Ascom GNT 807 was a robust electronic card payphone developed for public telephone networks during the late 1980s and 1990s. Although some sources describe it simply as an Ascom product from France, contemporary documentation identifies the manufacturer more specifically as Ascom Nordic A/S of Denmark, reflecting Ascom’s multinational structure. Russian certification records likewise identify Ascom Nordic, Denmark, as the manufacturer.

The GNT 807 was primarily a prepaid smart-card payphone, with a card reader, electronic display and keypad contained in a heavy, vandal-resistant housing. It could be connected to Ascom’s PMS (Payphone Management System), allowing operators to remotely monitor and manage large networks. It was compatible with later Ascom systems including eXANTO Card and Proxim GSM. Ascom claimed that by this period more than one million of its payphones were installed in around 70 countries, approximately 700,000 of them using chip cards.

A person reaches for the receiver of a payphone, with a focus on the keypad. The metallic payphone stands against a textured wall, evoking a sense of nostalgia.

The GNT 807 appears to have been particularly successful in Russia and the former Soviet market. Ascom began supplying Russia in 1994, and the GNT 807 became one of the principal foreign cardphones used during the modernisation of the Russian public telephone network. More than 1,500 were operating in St Petersburg by 1997, and by the early 2000s the St Petersburg network had around 2,000 GNT 807s. They also appeared in Petrozavodsk, Kaliningrad, Murmansk, Pskov, Novgorod and Cherepovets.

The model was therefore not specifically Russian: the GNT-807 RUS was a locally configured version of an internationally marketed Ascom platform. Its simple modular appearance, smart-card operation and centralised network management made it particularly suitable for countries replacing older coin-operated networks during the 1990s and early 2000s. Russian examples remained numerous into the mid-2000s, although they were increasingly supplemented by Ascom’s newer eXANTO models.

The GNT-807 consequently became part of the visual culture of post-Soviet Russia. Most famously, a GNT-807 is associated with Danila Bagrov, the protagonist of Alexei Balabanov’s cult 1997 film Brother (Брат). This connection has given the otherwise utilitarian payphone an unexpected place in Russian popular culture.

Below- these southern European payphones were made by GN payphone (Denmark) and deployed in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, etc.