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…

Greece, 1992

Following a period of experimentation started in 1987, during which several systems were tested, the first public cards were distributed just in 1992, at the International Fair of Thessaloniki. For the occasion, some chipcard-based phones…

Guernsey, 1994

Guernsey is an island located in the English Channel, facing the northwest coast of France, administratively dependent on the British Crown. Guernsey Telecoms began issuing chip cards in 1994, with a series of three values…

Hungary, 1991

It is not difficult to recognize the first phone cards of this nation of Eastern Europe ... the "First Issue" logo is clearly visible in Hungarian on the front of the cards, and in English…

Iceland, 1986

Optical cards, provided by Landis & Gyr, were introduced in 1986 and used until 1998. The first issued was a simple definitive with a 2mm optical band, of which there are two variants: the first…

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,…

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…

Italy, 1976: the first in the world

The first phonecard issued and sold to the public is Italian. It was issued in 1976 but no one at that time thought it was the starting of a new hobby that twenty years later…

Jersey, 1988

Jersey is the largest island in the English Channel, between the United Kingdom and France. It is a self-regulating dependency of the United Kingdom, with its own government and laws, which fuses English and French…

Latvia, 1995

Latvia, one of the Baltic republics, with two million inhabitants, regained independence in 1991 after the fall of the USSR, and has been part of the European Union since 2004. The first cards used in…