In Belarus, two companies issued telephone cards: the Beltelecom government company, which used the Urmet system and then, from 1995, the chip card system; and BelCel, which instead relied on the magnetic technology of the…
Austria, 1980
Austria always used the optical cards of Landis & Gyr for public telephony, and commercialized many different ones, both public and private. The first Austrian telephone card was yellow, without the white band, and with…
Belgium, 1977
Belgium was the second country in the world to issue telephone cards, after Italy, and for many years the system used was that provided by the Swiss Landis & Gyr. The first cards were two…
Hungary, 1991
It is not difficult to recognize the first phone cards of this nation of Eastern Europe ... the "First Issue" logo is clearly visible in Hungarian on the front of the cards, and in English…
Switzerland, 1982
The small country in the heart of old Europe has used the Landis & Gyr optical system for over 15 years, before moving on to chip cards. The first card produced was a definitive of…
Slovakia, 1993
Following the separation from the Czech Republic, on January 1, 1993, Slovakia began issuing its telephone cards, the first of which in the same month; it was a 50-unit card with a circulation of 20,000…
Romania, 1991
Chip-type cards were introduced in Romania as early as 1991, and the first of these, with a circulation of only 1,000 copies, was used during a field trial in Bucharest. The first large series of…
Poland, 1991
After testing different systems, such as Landis & Gyr, GPT, Alcatel, the magnetic card system proposed by Urmet was adopted, which was then used for several years, even if, after the first supplies of the…
Malta, 1991
For a few years, apart from a couple of illustrated, only ordinary cards were issued in Malta. The first was a 50-unit orange card (run 157,700), issued together with a 100-unit blue one (run 97,900):…
Iceland, 1986
Optical cards, provided by Landis & Gyr, were introduced in 1986 and used until 1998. The first issued was a simple definitive with a 2mm optical band, of which there are two variants: the first…
