From the Beginning to Our Days: a Short History of Phone Cards

It's arduous to imagine current world of communications without international cheap prepaid cards to Israel from Asia. In this period began intense development of phone cards throughout world specifically in the U.S.A. The evolving of calling cards led to their use in a lot of states. In our days the number of states who are using international phone card has increased to more than 200 for some reasons.

Now we'll speak about history of development and utilizing of calling cards. As the result of dearth of money and systematic burglary in the pay phone system the advent of calling cards was very important and necessary.

The answer was found fast, the provider of vending machines proposed international phone card that they have found. Prepaid calling cards were a proposition of telecommunication corporation SIDA.

The first state which began to apply this invention was Italy in 1976. In 1977 among the countries which started to insert calling cards attached Austria, France, Sweden and United Kingdom. These cards made likely to get rid of the many difficulties, consequently they quickly became popular among the consumers, soon the rest of Europe started to apply phone cards. Already in 1982, prepaid phone cards were applied in other parts of the world. During this time consumers of Asia get acquainted with calling cards.

Calling cards successfully found their application in the Subway in Japan. During the year 1987 these international calling card began to use in the Western world. The first corporations which presented magstripes technology were Siemens and General Electric Company. It is hard to imagine new world of prepaid phone cards without magnetic stripes technology.

The world of international calling card was entered by AT&T, a big communication corporation, in 1989. They opened the door to the universe of phone cards first to Hawaii and later to other regions of the USA. In 1990 phone cards began to be utilized on magnetic based. The development of these cards began to rise during this period. The first utilize of PIN numbers, long distance calls, and many another services continued to grow in Western world.

In the year 1992 popularity of phone cards has reached the highest points. All main communication companies began to output phone cards. Not only big telecommunication establishment understood the profit of manufacturing prepaid phone cards but also small companies started to create the cards of their own. The point of 12 million dollars was reached during only 2 years. An incredible jump in sellings in 1993, when the point reached 25 million US dollars, has caused interest of main companies to prepaid calling cards.

During the year 1995 emerged another invention in calling cards business. Calling cards were fitted with chips instead of magstripes. New finding caused incredible growing of sellings and they achieved 650 million dollars.

Today sellings account for more than billion dollars. In our time the calling cards contain a wide range of services, amid them: online calling cards, international phone cards, IP communication, fax and many another services.