The information in these pages is based on an article written by Mark Jacobs in the August 1996 issue of ITC Magazine. At that time, Mark was the editor of ITC and was a great conduit for phonecard information provided from all over the world. I am certain that Mark would not be offended by me publishing this and sharing the information with collectors everywhere.

Mark's original information is now a bit out of date, due to advances in technology and changes in the chip manufacturing industry, but it is still very valid for most phonecard identification.

When talking about phonecard suppliers and chip types, it is important to remember two things:

1) Not all phonecard suppliers are chip manufacturers, and;

2) Not all chip manufacturers are phonecard suppliers.

This means that, almost invariably, phonecard suppliers will source their chips from other companies, such as Siemens and Gemplus, so you will see lots of suppliers using the same chip types. The list on the left represents the card manufacturers rather than the chip manufacturers or, indeed, any telcos.

A telco would source particular cards from a card manufacturer, who may, in turn, get their chips from another company. In the UK, for instance, BT use cards manufactured by both Gemplus and GPT. The Gemplus cards have Gemplus chips, whereas GPT use Siemens chips for their cards.

This can mean that the card manufacturer is difficult to identify, so there are a couple of other methods available to identify the card manufacturer. Sometimes, it is obvious and the name of the manufacturer is actually printed on the card, but there are also other abbreviations or symbols printed on the card that provide information. In other cases the card manufacturer is identified within the control number of the card.

Symbols

Some of the symbols used to identify card manufacturers are listed to the left. Not all cards will have one of these symbols (IME, not many cards show these symbols and I have also noticed other symbols not shown in this list - Nig).

Abbreviations
Obvious abbreviations have been used on cards in the past, GM for Gemplus, sol for Solaic and so on. Some are not so obvious and depend on knowing the numeric abbreviations for suppliers. For instance, on France Telecom cards there is a letter at the beginning of the batch control number. Each letter refers to the card suppliers; A = Solaic, B = Gemplus, C = Schlumberger, D = CP8 Oberthur.

In Germany, a number is used at the beginning of the control number that identifies the manufacturer; 0 = Orga, 1 = G&D, 2 = ODS, 3 = Gemplus, 4 = Solaic, 5 = Uniqa, 7 = Schlumberger. (Note, there is no 6!).

Control Code Identification

Where none of the above methods are used, some control codes have the card manufacturer hidden within them.

I have not quoted Mark's article verbatim so there are some parts that may be a bit confusing here, sorry. In his original article, Mark did not go into a lot of specific detail on each of the chips (and I can't say I blame him!) which is why there is not much detail on these pages. In the future I would like to add some actual pictures of cards that carry the specified chips, as well as updating the actual list of suppliers' chip modules. I can't say when ATM as I have limited access to a scanner. Besides, in case you haven't noticed, I have lots of other pages that need a scanner too;-)

In the meantime, you can download scanned images of the original pages from the links below. There are three pages in all, each page is available in either jpg or zip format. Selecting the jpg files will cause the pics to be displayed in a new browser window and selecting the zip files allows you to download them. There is also a zip file containing all three pages, so if you are one of those people that like it all at once, this is the one for you!.

All copyrights for the material taken from ITC are acknowledged by the author of these web pages, as are trademarks, tradenames, realnames, pseudonyms and aliases. If you ever see this Mark, I would hope that you will say hello via email, rather than via a solicitor;-)