The Bionic Pay Phone:
Teligent Answers the Call

Jennifer Coombes

You're in Sweden and you have to make a quick call. If you're lucky, the next phone booth you encounter will contain one of Teligent's new Inform@fons. Far from your ordinary pay phone, this QNX-based public telephone brings a whole new dimension to Bell's humble invention.

Inform@fon looks like a normal pay telephone - it features a familiar handset and keypad, and does all the things pay phones have always done - but that's where the similarity ends. Housed in a sleek, cast-aluminum armor is a veritable smšrgŒsbord of functions. With this phone you can make calls, send and receive email and faxes, do your banking, connect to the Internet, get tickets to a performance - the sky's the limit.

Multimedia kiosk

The concept of Inform@fon was born when Telia, the Swedish telephone company, asked Teligent to develop three prototypes of a new pay phone concept for the Telecom'95 exhibition in Geneva. Of the three models presented, Telia chose to continue the development of Inform@fon, which at the time was little more than a standalone DOS-based PC with pay phone capabilities.

Teligent took this initial concept and developed it into one of the most advanced pay phones on the market. Designed for indoor use in airports, train stations, shopping malls, financial institutions, and so on, the Inform@fon essentially turns a pay phone into a multimedia kiosk.

It performs a whole range of communications functions you wouldn't normally expect from a pay phone, and serves as both an information storage facility and a gateway to external information and service providers. Tailored applications can be added depending on its location. For example, if placed in a bank, Inform@fon can be configured to perform online services and retrieve information concerning that particular bank.

Who you gonna call?

With Inform@fon, users can write, edit, transmit, and receive email and fax messages. With the help of an external fax machine, documents can be scanned and transmitted as a regular fax, or as an attachment to an email message.

Inform@fon can be a gateway to Videotex and Minitel services, and provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) so users can send and receive files from a PC (via an RJ11 connection). In addition, SMS messages can be transmitted to GSM telephones, and teletext pages can be viewed on an LCD screen.

The Inform@fon, of course, also operates as a normal pay phone, but with advanced functionality. It can handle collect calls and can be used as a text terminal (using the ITU V.21 standard), allowing hearing-impaired people to communicate through public telephones. It can act as a pager, transmitting messages to a pager service subscriber. And, it can help increase call completion and help customers use the terminal. For example, if a number is busy or there's no answer, customers can leave a message that will be forwarded later.

Surfin' in a phone booth

Among the seemingly unlimited functions of the Inform@fon is its ability to act as a complete information office. The Inform@fon provides access to the world wide web. In fact, customers can browse and view information in HTML format on the LCD screen. Onscreen information, like a telephone directory, an encyclopedia, and an intelligent, interactive map, is also available with the touch of a key.

Cash or charge?

Since credit cards and other magnetic strip "smart" cards are becoming very popular, the phone comes standard with a magnetic strip reader. A credit card administration function validates the card and transmits the transaction to the card issuer. Credit card authorization can be performed on- or off-line.

The terminal also allows users to perform secure banking transactions using smart cards, and can act as an electronic cash register to add funds to Sweden's "Electronic Purse" card, a smart card that consumers load up with cash to spend on public transportation, pay phones, and so on.

Box office & billboard

A printer enables the Inform@fon to issue receipts for banking transactions, and to sell and deliver tickets to theater or sporting events.

Even when the unit's communications functions are idle, the Inform@fon is busy displaying advertisements and announcements.

Nuts and bolts

The telephone features a handset, a specially-designed QWERTY keyboard, a mouse, a combined smart/magnetic strip card reader, a 10.5" color LCD screen, a 33.6 kbps PSTN/modem interface, and interfaces for an external fax and printer. The system is diskless and is currently based on a 486 processor.

A match made in (telephony) heaven

Great emphasis was put on realtime performance, scalability, and fault tolerance in Inform@fon's design. But the application also required POSIX compatibility, and solid connectivity options.

Also, since Inform@fon is a multimedia application that uses an LCD screen, GUI handling is a big part of the application. Teligent needed a small, flexible GUI and a powerful application builder.

QNX provided all of this and more. With QNX, all of Inform@fon's functions are performed online in realtime so customers get information that's no more than a fraction of a second old. QNX's modularity gave Teligent the ability to customize their application to a small storage capacity. (Today the QNX-customized runtime takes up only 3M of flash.) Modularity also meant Teligent didn't have to pay for unused software functionality. QNX's support for TCP/IP gives the Inform@fon reliable, industry-standard connectivity options.

The PhAB application builder for Photon was a definite timesaver during Inform@fon's development. According to Teligent's development team, other OSes lack a powerful application builder for their GUI.

Inform@fon can be completely tailored depending on its location because it was built from the ground up with customization in mind. The terminal's hardware modules can be added or replaced as needed, and its software applications, which take advantage of QNX's inherent modular architecture, can be downloaded via the PSTN whenever new services are required.

Says Christer Young, project manager at Teligent, "We evaluated Venix and pSOS, but we found that QNX 4 offered a more flexible product, a better GUI, and TCP/IP connectivity. We couldn't find any comparable OS technology. QNX also provided a more complete product - fewer functions were under development." He adds, "We only had to write one driver of our own - the rest were included with QNX."

Core architecture

The core of the Inform@fon is Teligent's P90/E software, a proprietary distributed transaction architecture. Teligent was able to easily integrate this with QNX by porting the translation protocol to QNX (which accounts for about 25% of the application code), and developing new software to handle other features of the Inform@fon. Twenty-five percent of the new P90 software is reusable in other applications and 50%, mostly Photon-based code, is unique to the Inform@fon app.

Custom terminals

Thanks to QNX's modularity, Inform@fon offers a generic platform for multimedia services. The hardware and software components are modular so the terminal is completely customizable - functions can be added at any time or replaced with newer ones. If the need for a new service arises, software can be downloaded via the PSTN, or new hardware modules can be added to the system. This modularity is particularly useful for customizing the terminal for specialized locations.

Calling all markets

Production of Inform@fon started in early November and since then twenty-five units have been installed throughout Sweden as a field trial. Teligent predicts that volume production will start in a matter of weeks. They're also investigating moving into other markets.

Teligent plans to continue making improvements to the Inform@fon. New developments will include improving transmission speed with ISDN, migrating to a Pentium processor, and adding an external printer and secure Internet communication (HTTP-S).

For more information on the Inform@fon, visit www.teligent.se/, send email to Christer Young (young@teligent.se), or call +46 8 448 06 22.

Teligent is a client of Alvsjo Data, QSSL's agent in Sweden. To reach Alvsjo, phone +46 886 8444 or send email to John Clewett (jc@alvsjodata.se).