www.worldpayphones.com

 

Africa

Morocco
 
gallery
(German Landis and Gyr) payphone

Morocco : IPM is the first Payphone supplier in the country

As a first step, IPM Group delivered 5'000 card operated Payphones
Rotor 2000 to Maroc Telecom, now they are more than 10’000. The Payphones are managed by a 2-layer system composed of 7 regional centres and 1 national centre.

The Moroccan users are extremely satisfied with this equipment and more than 400’000 cards are used each month.

IPM Italy payphone
A man holding the receiver of a public phone
In the cities, most homes have a telephone with local, long-distance and international access. Cell phones have also become increasingly popular. One finds that it is less expensive to have a prepaid card than to use a monthly billing system. The phone card will give the holder a number and the capacity to receive calls for a designated period of time, even when the actual calling minutes have been used up.

As well as having public telephones on the street, Moroccan cities have teleboutiques, large comfortable rooms with many telephones and booths, where one can use the telephone to make both local, long-distance and international calls. Before making the call, one must get change from the attendant. The fees are reasonable, but as in most cases, international calls are quite a bit more expensive. Pre-paid phone cards are an option that reduces the cost of international calls.

Given the vast differences between westernized life in the cities and the nature of rural life in the towns, a telephone is much harder to find in the villages. There is usually one public telephone per village, and often that is the only telephone for miles.

Telephone shop sign

Telephone shop sign

Telephone kiosk sign

Telephone kiosk sign

Pre-paid calling card

Pre-paid calling card

Telephone company advertisement

Telephone company advertisement

Telephone kiosk

Telephone kiosk

 

Morocco PTT Token
My "PTT MAROC" telephone token of Morocco.

   Notice on the image, on the obverse, the cornucopia privy mark of Monnaie de Paris, it is just below the letter "R". I have a few recent French tokens with this privy mark, some pieces with a pair of these. On coins made by Monnaie de Paris the cornucopia privy mark is always accompanied by a privy mark for the Engraver General (e.g. in recent years - dolphin, bee or horseshoe).
   On the reverse of the token there are two round bottomed vertical grooves. Quite a number of telephone tokens (and other machine tokens) from other parts of the world also have grooves, some have round-bottomed groove and others flat-bottomed ones. (I have seen tokens with "V"-Bottomed grooves too, but not telephone tokens.) Only tokens have grooves of any sort and never coins - so grooves are an easy way for discriminator mechanisms to distinguish between coins and tokens - and size, shape, spacing and number of grooves are a useful way for the mechanisms to distinguish between one type of token and another. Grooves, of course, cannot be struck onto a coin - too much material would require to be displaced - it would seem that grooves are normal cast (and occassionally formed). The grooves on the PTT MAROC tokens go nearly halfway through the thickness of the token, most grooved tokens I have seem to have grooves very close to half the token thickness.

With special thanks to Mr Paul Baker http://www.wbcc.fsnet.co.uk/