While telephone was a magical enabler making long-distance interpersonal communication possible, it did put a few restrictions. The wired landline could not be hauled while you moved. At such times you could hire phone services from the Local Call Office. However, as telephone became more prevalent, these became less common. Of course the cellular phone came which added mobility to telephonic communication, but even then you were confined within your service area. If you went far out of town, the cell phone would be pretty much useless. Roaming services have added full mobility, but these could be expensive and not ideal for all users.

The ideal solution, which has been available for long, is the humble phone card. Phone cards are small credit-card sized cards that store a certain prepaid value from which the call charge is progressively deducted until the balance runs out. In use as early as 1976 in Italy, phone cards became tremendously popular later on because of its convenience, and phone card collection itself became a hobby called telegery or fusilately.

Principally two technologies are used – stored value, which stores the value of the total possible call charge within the card, and remote-access, which accesses a remote database before and after each call to calculate balance. The phone card systems turn out to be much cheaper than using public phones, and add great mobility – they are accepted throughout the land.

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