The Brazilian Phone System
by Derneval (curupira@2600.com)
A few words can describe it. For the time being, it sucks. But there are a few tricks and even if some people read it and say, "This guy doesn't write about the things I know," they can write me back and fill me in on the details I missed. Anyway, telling it all would spoil it for a lot of guys who would not like to see a few things fixed. But that's for another time.
The present phone system has some good qualities. Let's start with them. After the military took power in 1964, one of their main goals was telecommunications. So, all parts of the country were linked by phone lines. On a good sunny day you can call someone even if the guy is far away from a big town. Small villages with less than a thousand people can be found with a phone line. No joke. Even with the rain forest around, one can find a Post Office somewhere and some sort of place where a phone call can be made. The bad thing about it is that it doesn't always work properly.
Brazil has a communications satellite that helps link North and South, West and East (it's a country almost as large as the USA). But suppose you live in Rio de Janeiro and want to call some place two or three thousand miles away. Inside rain forest or not, it doesn't matter. In Rio de Janeiro, one can't get a line when it rains. In São Paulo, another big town with 11 million people, getting a line at four o'clock is luck of the Irish. Trying to make a phone call from São Paulo to some place more than 2000 miles away is also difficult. The system works, but it did not grow fast enough, nor was enough money invested in its growth. It's got some technology, but God knows why it is not used. Only recently has tone dialing been (slowly) introduced.
The phone company, which is state owned, doesn't have enough lines for everybody. So, a phone line in a town like São Paulo can cost between $2,000 and $6,000. That's if you don't want to wait. If time is no problem, then you can join something called "Plano de Expansao," a plan that will deliver the phone in about two years time with some real low monthly payments. People end up paying about $1,200. Want to know more? They give your money back if you decide not to wait. In fact, the phone company will understand if you complain about that. After all, that can happen if they are late in the schedule. Some people wait for more than two years, the phone line paid for and not installed yet. Shocking, isn't it?
A cell phone is much easier to get, only about $300. But the calls are a bit more expensive. The cellular market had big growth for that reason. There's a big business, at this moment, selling cellular phones. Huge advertisements are everywhere even though the newspapers are full of stories of people who got their phones "cloned" and received huge bills because of calls they never made, sometimes to countries like Lebanon. The phone company is getting used to the complaints about that.
How is a phone call from a public phone for the average citizen? Well, there are plenty of public phones, almost on every corner. And most of the time, even when it's raining, it's not hard to make a phone call. Instead of a coin, one has to have a special metal coin called "ficha." Not easy to counterfeit and the phones are tough to break down. But it's possible to "phreak it." The wires connecting the phone can be connected by some diode that short circuits the pulse made when the "ficha" drops inside. Only the first one is lost. In the old days, people would insert a string in order to get it back, but that got old pretty fast. Nobody even thinks about trying it anymore.
Some time ago, long distance calling required a special "ficha." I say some time ago because these were more expensive and since then the phone people started to understand how easy it was to "phreak it." So a card was introduced in order to replace the special "ficha." One can choose between a 20, 50, 75, or 90 unit card, each unit being a three minute call. But the price, that's something. One pays $4,50 for a 90 unit card which runs out faster than a bullet when one needs to dial long distance. It's 63 cents per minute to call long distance, but that's at the Central or at home. In public phones, the number of units goes a bit faster, it seems. Only three Centrals are open on Sundays, when one pays only 7 cents a minute. That in a town of 11 million. It's either join the queue or pay more money for those 90 unit cards.
Brazilian phone cards, the backs of which can be scraped to reveal a thin metal plate (top).
A new card (middle, bottom) worth 20 units (60 minutes).
I've done some research on them. According to the publication Card Technology Today, the card is either inductive or magnetic. It's basically a plastic card with a thin metal plate, covered by a kind of gray ink or plastic, very hard to take out. If one bothers to take away this ink or plastic and get to see the metal, they will find that it is cut by holes and lines. This sequence is repeated four times, and it is the same in all cards, regardless of the number of units. Some people claim that by cutting on the corner of the card or on some special place, an infinite card can be created. Others claim that by soldering with care, it is also possible to achieve the same thing. The official explanation is that the cards have some microfuses that the phone "burns" as the time and the talk go by.
But sometimes, the real "phreaking" is completing a long distance phone call. There's a long distance service, called DDD, which means Distance Direct Dialing. One punches all the numbers and gets a sound that the line is busy. How to overcome that? Try again. But if you're smart, you'll punch the zone codes slowly, trying to do it as if you were a modem, punching a key after each don't-know-how-many-seconds-or-milliseconds. It's a matter of concentration. Can't do that when angered or in a hurry. Just like Zen. Think about the tree in the woods, does it make noise when it goes down? Sounds complicated? Yeah, but it works and it helped me to complete calls when people gave up, after repeating the dialing for half an hour. It's the same thing for a collect call. It's tough, no matter what side of the line you're on. (Once I had to call an address 1500 kilometers north in order to ask people there to deliver a message 1500 kilometers further north.) But I have to say that it works, if one has enough time to try and do it the right way.
In the end, through constant practice (because every time you don't get a line you keep practicing), it's possible to guess the right intervals between each key pressing.
Right now, AT&T and other foreign phone companies are trying to get in here. There is even some advertisement of ISDN. Will it succeed? Nobody knows. It's known that the state phone company is checking on the use of things like BlueBEEP. A few Brazilian people who claim to know something about boxing told me that only through public phones is it a safe thing. The cost of a phone line is a big reason to be paranoid about being caught phreaking. Most of the people who do, do it only because they're living far away from home.
Lots of people try and sometimes succeed using others people's phones in order to dial phone sex, horoscopes, and other online services. Nothing to say about that. Voice mailboxes are a hit. Only $10 a month.
A voice mail receipt, which is also the same as a normal phone receipt.
The little round things are the metal coin fichas (not to scale).
Brazilian phreakers don't trade their secrets because of the fear of things getting fixed. If the phone company finds out, sure they'll change. Thousands and thousands of people go south, trying to escape misery. Every one of them gets homesick, for North and South are sometimes 99 percent different. So, any malfunction in the phone system would grow old pretty fast... In fact, the blue phones that used special "fichas" would be vandalized, once in a while, by those people, who would break them down in order to call their relatives back home.
Card technology is attractive because the phone doesn't carry anything that might be stolen. So this sort of physical hardware "call-phreaking" is out. Sad part is this was a change that made some people cry, because it ruined it for the guys who didn't need to destroy the phone in order to call the folks back home. Such good things don't last for long here. If someone really wants to learn about phone services, there are technical schools (secondary schools) that teach it. But it is unheard of for people to try to learn it some other way, or for the joy of it. There are no files or philes. And the phone system is reputed as being too primitive to be really hacked. They are trying to improve it. But very slowly.