December 6, 2001

 AT&T has decided to stop offering ACTS(Automated Coin Toll
Service) probably because they hit their record sales for pre-paid calling
cards today, and red box fraud had driven rates for a long distance call
up to $5.15 for 3 minutes when cocots offer $1 for 4 minutes to anywhere
in the US.  A recording I got after inserting the last quarter for a long 
distance call today:

"Your call will now be completed, please note -- effective soon, this
phone will no longer accept coins for AT&T Long Distance calls, you may
wish to begin using a pre-paid calling card or other payment method as a
substitute."

You can listen to this recording at http://home.dal.net/lucky225/redboxatt.wav

What they fail to mention is you wont be able to use any other carrier to
make long distance coin calls, for instance 10-10-222+number, tho the
carrier is MCI for this particular dial-a-round, AT&T is the only company
with ACTS equipment and a coin call placed through 10-10-2222 will always
end up with a cheerful, "Thank you for using AT&T."