Why Red Boxing Doesn't Work

by The Prophet

To understand why Red Boxing doesn't work, it is important to understand why it did at one point work (and still does in some areas), and to understand the various types of payphones and toll collecting systems.

There are two major types of payphones.  Standard fortress payphones utilize a ground start and ACTS toll collection mechanism, and are usually operated by the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC) in any given area.  Examples of ILECs are US West, GTE, Pacific Bell, etc.  Such phones are usually manufactured by Western Electric or GTE, although in Alaska and Canada you still find some old brown post-pay Northern Telecom payphones.

Customer-Owned Coin Operated Telephones (COCOTs) are operated primarily by private payphone owners.  However, ILECs operate COCOT-ized payphones of this type.  BellSouth's operations in southern Florida are an excellent example of this.

The primary difference between a "standard" payphone and a COCOT-type payphone is that with a "standard" phone, toll collection and verification is based in the central office.  With a COCOT-type phone, it is handled by the telephone itself.  This is a very important distinction, which you will appreciate later.

There is another type of fortress phone, which is post-pay.  You see these only rarely used, in some parts of Canada, remote areas of the U.S., and in Alaska.  I won't go into how post-payphones work since they're so rarely seen.

Let's briefly consider how a standard fortress payphone works.

To make a local call on a standard payphone, you insert the amount of money required.  In this area, it's 35 cents.  After you deposit 35 cents, the payphone grounds itself.  This "ground start" indicates to the central office that the proper amount of money has been paid and the central office lets the call go through.  If you didn't put in the correct amount of money, then you'll be routed to a recording instructing you to deposit 35 cents before making your call.  Because the ground start mechanism is not dependent on any tones, you cannot Red Box local calls, unless you route them through a long-distance carrier.  Sometimes this is possible; try dialing a carrier access code before your local call.  As an interesting side note, residential phones don't have a ground start mechanism, which can create very amusing results if their line class is inadvertently changed to that of a payphone.

Long-distance calls are a little more complicated.

It costs less money to call Portland, Oregon (503) from Seattle than it does to call Gander, Newfoundland (709) from Seattle.  About $3 less for the first three minutes, in fact.  Additionally, toll rates are not flat, and they vary by time of day.  Clearly, a ground start mechanism isn't a good way to bill such calls.  You can only set one fixed amount for ground start calls, and you can't easily limit the time, either.  Recognizing this, payphones are equipped with a tone generator which plays an appropriate pulse to indicate the type and quantity of coin you've dropped in.

It used to be that when you placed a long-distance call, an operator would come on, inform you of the charge, and then would listen to and write down every coin that you dropped into the phone.  (There is one pulse for a nickel, two pulses for a dime, and five pulses for a quarter which is how the operator could tell what you were depositing.)  She would proceed to connect your call upon your deposit of the correct amount, and would either collect the balance at the end of the call, or would break in every few minutes to get you to deposit more money.

But with the golden age of layoffs and computerization, ACTS was born.  ACTS stands for Automated Coin Toll System.  It does the job of an operator by listening to the tones generated by the payphone when you deposit coins and tallying them appropriately.  However, it's a computer and is not as smart as an operator.  This is where Red Boxes come into play.

A Red Box is, quite simply, a device that generates the same coin deposit tones and loosely the same timing - as a payphone.  Contrary to popular belief, it's not necessary to modify a RadioShack tone dialer with a 6.5536 MHz crystal to create a Red Box.  (6.49 MHz is a far better frequency anyway.)  You can record the tones directly from a payphone to a voice mailbox and record them to a Hallmark greeting card or a microcassette recorder, and that will work.

Whichever method you use to create a Red Box (I won't belabor the point of how to manufacture one, there are plenty of instructions elsewhere), its purpose is simply to fool ACTS into thinking you're putting money into the phone.

ACTS has rapidly disappeared over the past few years.  The primary reason for this is the FCC.  With the 1996 telecommunications bill, the FCC ruled that ILECs may not offer any services to their own payphone divisions that they do not also offer to independent operators of COCOTs.  This made offering ACTS and ground start billing problematic, since ACTS would have to be upgraded to charge different rates based on each COCOT operator's criteria.  Additionally, it would have been necessary for ILECs to handle separations and settlements for the COCOT owners.  This was a bigger job than ILECs wanted, especially to maintain a system that was increasingly plagued by toll fraud.

As a result, many ILECs began replacing their phones with Northern Telecom Millenniums, or COCOT-izing their Western Electric payphones (such as what BellSouth did).  Because the billing is all done in the phone itself, rather than via ACTS, there is no need to fool ACTS any longer.  Therefore, you can play tones at a COCOT or a COCOT-ized ILEC phone all day and it won't work.  Also, some ILECs who kept ACTS (usually by offering it to COCOT owners but making the fees so high that nobody took advantage) such as Pacific Bell have installed filter chips in their fortress phones.  These filters block the handset microphone until the call supervises, which does an effective job of blocking Red Boxing.

Red Boxing does still work in some places.  However, it's eventually going away.  What really should go with Red Boxing are access charges, since long distance ought not be billed by the minute anyway.  But I digress...