Not Quite Dead Yet

The Current State of Payphones, ACTS, and Rex Boxing in the United States

by Black Ratchet  (blackrachet@blackrachet.org)

Every time someone asks, "Can I still Red Box?" the constant murmur of the peanut gallery echoes in reply, "Oh!  Red Boxing is dead!  You can't do that anymore!"  Apparently because AT&T shut down their ACTS links, everyone thinks that every other phone company did too.  Au contraire.

Now for those of you thinking, "Red Boxing?  ACTS?  AT&T?  Phones?" let's sit down and explain.

In the beginning, Ma Bell created the payphone, and lo, she smiled and said it was good.  The first coin phones for the Bell System were manufactured by the Gray Telephone Pay Station company in 1898.

From 1898 up until the 1970s in some places, it was impossible to dial your own long distance calls without the assistance of an operator first.  The original payphones produced by Gray, and after Gray's patents expired, by the Bell System were referred to in the vernacular as "three-slot" payphones.  They had separate slots for nickels, dimes, and quarters.

When you placed a long distance call, you first dialed the operator and gave her the number.  The she would ask you to deposit the amount of the initial rate into the phone.  When you did, the coins would activate mechanical bells in the payphone: one ding for a nickel, two dings for a dime, and a resounding gong for a quarter.  After hearing the right amount of bells, the operator would put your call through.  This system had numerous drawbacks: namely, the operator needed to be on the line when the coins were deposited, and the operator could be fooled by something as simple as a tape recording.

Around the mid-1960s, the three-slot payphones started getting phased out and the Bell System started phasing in newer "single-slot" payphones.  These, as the name leads you to believe, had one slot, and instead of bells, they used a single frequency tone of 2200 Hz when coins were deposited: one pulse for a nickel, two for a dime, and five for a quarter.

However, as 2200 Hz was "talkable," as in you can "inadvertently" make a 2200 Hz tone with your voice, and automated system could not be used to determine if you deposited coins.  Ma Bell did not want someone with a high squeaky voice accidentally getting free time on his or her phone call!  Since there was no automated system, long distance phone calls still had to be handled by humans.  Operators still had to control coin collect, coin return, and call setup functions.

The changed in 1978 with the introduction of "Automatic Coin Toll Service" (ACTS).

ACTS allowed the network to automatically collect coins for long distance by listening for coin tones from the payphone.  ACTS addressed the issue of "talkability" by making the coin tones multifrequency, that is, overlaying 1700 Hz on top of the 2200 Hz signal.  People cannot make a MF tone by talking, thus ensuring that people would not get a free ride.

The was considered foolproof.  Riiiiiight...

Phreaks and pholks quickly figured out the new system and the era of "Red Boxing" in the 1980s began in earnest.  People found they could easily fool the new system by playing tapes of coins into the handset or rewiring Radio Shack tone dialers.  A toll-fraud arms race quickly developed between the phone companies and the fraudsters.  The phone company would find out a way of stopping a certain technique and people would find a way to work around the restriction.  People would Red Box free phone calls across the United States with abandon.

This continued up until mid-2001 when AT&T pulled the nuclear option.  Citing declining revenues and massive overhead, AT&T petitioned the FCC to shut down its nationwide ACTS system.  In mid-to-late 2002, the cord was pulled and the fraudsters cried out into the night.  People gave up on their Red Boxes and put them into the trash to join the Blue Boxes already at the dump.  The end, right?

No.

While nationwide ACTS has been discontinued by AT&T, everyone seems to have forgotten that ACTS as a system is still in use by other phone companies.  Verizon, AT&T [formerly SBC], and Qwest all still have ACTS systems active within the United States.  The catch?  They are only used for local toll calls.  (By the way: BellSouth customers?  You lose.  BellSouth removed the whole coin phone kit and kaboodle around 2001 or so.)

What is a "local toll" you ask?  Well, in 1984 after the Bell System breakup, the Bell System was broken up into smaller local telephone companies, while AT&T was given the long distance portion of the network.  Now, what was stopping the smaller companies from carrying their own long distance calls between areas they cover?  The agreement dictated that the United States was to be broken up into "Local Access Transport Areas," otherwise known as LATAs.  The agreement stated that the local telephone companies could carry their own traffic for calls within a LATA, but if it was between LATAs they needed to hand it over to a long distance provider, such as AT&T.

What does that have to do with Red Boxing?  Well, say I am in Boston, which is within LATA 128.  That means I can call within eastern Massachusetts and still have the phone call go exclusively over Verizon New England's equipment.  However, if I call to western Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Rhode Island, while still within Verizon's coverage area, it needs to go over a long distance service.  The upside for this is that for intra-LATA telephone calls, Verizon thankfully uses an ACTS system allowing me to enjoy the sweet sound of a telephone network handling my coin control.  Other less scrupulous people can also abuse this system with a Red Box.

There are a couple of caveats to this: You are unlikely to find an ACTS controlled payphone that is not owned by your Local Exchange Carrier (LEC: Verizon, AT&T (formerly SBC), or Qwest depending on where you are in the U.S.), and LECs are also moving away from ACTS for the same reason AT&T did, so it's slowly disappearing.  The best way to find an ACTS phone is to look for an old Bell payphone owned by your LEC.  The next step is to dial a number that is outside your local calling area but inside your LATA, and then wait to see what happens.  If the voice asking you to deposit money sounds more like a recording then a synthesized computer voice, you have a shot.  Flash the hook, and if an operator comes on asking you for money, congrats.  You are likely on an ACTS system.

Now a minor rant: You'll note that I referred to Red Boxing repeatedly as "fraud" and the users and "fraudsters."  Why, you ask?  Because they are.  Phone phreaking is not about getting free phone calls, it's about understanding how the phone system works.  Phone phreaks don't do toll fraud, and people that do are the same kind of people that break into computer systems and call themselves hackers.  I do not condone toll fraud in any way, shape, or form, and I'm only presenting this info to once and for all stop the misinformation given when people ask, "Hey, does Red Boxing still work?"

For those of you who are unlucky enough to not have access to an ACTS payphone or are just interested in listening to what a normal ACTS phone call sounds like, I will humbly plug both my own website at blackratchet.org and Strom Carlson's website at stromcarlson.com.  Both contain recordings of ACTS calls in action, among other recordings of telephonic goodness.  Also, to hear the older style "three-slot" payphones, I heartily recommend phonetrips.com.  If coin phones are your thing, I again humbly recommend checking out my own project, Yet Another Payphone List at yapl.org, El Jefe's Payphone Directory at payphone-directory.org, the Payphone Project at payphone-project.com, for finally, the ever interesting phoneswarm.com.

Shouts to The Digital Dawg Pound, Strom Carlson, Evan Doorbell, Bill from New York, The Mark Bernay Society, Boston 2600, and all the phreaks and pholks at the Binary Revolution Forums (binrev.com/forums). The Revolution Will Be Digitized!


ACTS Block Diagram

Listen to a TOPS-based ACTS from SBC  Source: Strom Carlson

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