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Phone cards, also known as calling cards, have become an integral way of life in today’s busy work schedules. These cards are basically a convenient means to flexibly pay for your phone calls on credit basis system.
Similar in dimensions to a typical credit card - phone card – is purchased from the market for a specific balance in the pre-paid based payment system. When the value exhausts, you need to buy a new pre-paid phone card to carry on with the telecommunication service. The other type of payment system follows credit card principles for dispensing call charges. Technologically speaking, phone cards may be classified as stored-value and remote memory.
Stored value phone card functions akin to ATM card in terms of being inserted into a pay phone machine to be read for balance and avail talk time thereof. In other words, the card physically stores its own value to be decoded by a special machine.
Remote memory phone cards, on the other hand, store their value on a remote database location, which is accessed each time using an access number, a unique PIN number and a set of instructions to be stringently followed. As remote memory phone cards are cheaper and rather reachable, these phone cards are rising in popularity and may be purchased from retail stores of almost all countries worldwide.
Recently, companies are also selling remote memory phone cards through email by introducing a more feasible concept of ‘calling accounts’ that altogether eliminates the need of printing a physical card.
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