Great Britain, 1981

The first cards issued by British Telecom date back to 1981 and the system adopted was the optical card system of Landis & Gyr. The cards were initially produced in Switzerland, but from March 1983…

Faroe Islands, 1993

The Faroe Islands are a subarctic archipelago of 18 islands, located off the northern coast of Europe, between the Norwegian Sea and the north of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between Iceland and Norway. The islands…

Germany, 1983

Deutche Bundespost ran parallel field trials of four different systems before definitively adopting chip cards. The first trials began in June 1983 with the optical cards of Landis & Gyr. 30 telephones were installed in…

Åland Islands, 1990

The Åland Islands is an archipelago province at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea belonging to Finland. It is autonomous, demilitarised and is the only monolingually Swedish-speaking region in Finland.…

Ireland, 1988

The trial of phonecards in Ireland first started in Dublin on the 23 April 1988 with the installation of 36 Plessey telephones. Cards with 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 units were supplied by GPT,…

Russia, 1991

Following the disintegration of the USSR, officialized on December 26, 1991, the Comstar company, which already provided telephone cards and services to the Soviet Union, continued to issue GPT magnetic cards for the new Russian…

Spain, 1981

The prepaid public telephone system began in Spain in 1981, using the Landis & Gyr optical technology cards. The first two cards produced had both a scale of 120 units, but the cost per unit…

Portugal, 1982

The first Portuguese telephone cards date back to 1982: in those years, two companies provided the public telephone service in Portugal: the TLP (Telefones de Lisboa and Porto), active in the cities of Lisbon and…

France, 1978

Before finally installing the public telephone system based on chip cards, France Telecom conducted in 1978 some trials based on magnetic cards provided by Landis & Gyr, and then installed, in 1980, a system provided…

Montenegro, 2000

Even though until 2 June 2006 the Republic of Montenegro was united to the Republic of Serbia with the name of Serbia and Montenegro, already in 2000 it began to issue its own chip cards.…