Some test and demo cards from Ireland

Telecom Eireann first introduced phonecards into the Republic of Ireland in the year 1988. The brand name chosen for these cards was “CallCard”. Telecom Eireann, Ireland's state-owned telecommunications company became privatized in 1999. Subsequently the…

Isle of Man, 1987

The Isle of Man is a self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Ireland. The first cards, one 10 units with a 14,500 run and one 20 units with a…

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…

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…

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…

Sint Maarten (Netherlands Antilles), 1987

Saint Martin (in Dutch Sint Maarten) is an island located about 240 km away from Puerto Rico, in the northeastern section of the Caribbean. It is part of the group of Windward Islands in the…

Sint Eustatius (Netherlands Antilles), 1987

Sint Eustatius is an island that constitutes a special municipality of the Netherlands, located in the Caribbean Sea east of the Virgin Islands. Until 2010 it was part of the Netherlands Antilles and in 1987,…

Saba (Netherlands Antilles), 1987

Saba is the smallest island in the Dutch Caribbean and since 2010 is a special municipality of the Netherlands, but previously it was one of the islands that made up the Netherlands Antilles, a former…

Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles), 1990

Despite being the largest of the islands that made up the Netherlands Antilles, dissolved in 2010, Curaçao began to use telephone cards later than the others. As for the other islands, the technology used was…