Supreme Court to hear payphone appeal

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal requested by AT&T and Sprint Nextel in a lawsuit that had been filed against them by pay phone aggregators. The aggregators filed the suit on behalf of small pay phone operators who they say have missed out on revenue from coinless long-distance calls. Long-distance companies are required to pay those payphone operators a fee for long-distance calls dialed from pay phones, but which use a 1-800 number.

Interestingly, this is all coming to a head as traditional telcos, such as AT&T, are exiting the pay phone business.

For more:
- see this Associated Press story [1] in Forbes

Related articles:
- AT&T [2] acknowledged last month it is getting out of the pay phone business