Background

The dial around compensation system in its present incarnation is the infamous FCC per call compensation system. At its core, the system is a very straightforward concept. All telecommunications long distance carriers whose customers originate and complete a telephone call from a payphone must compensate the owner of the payphone (the payphone service provider, or PSP) a fixed amount for the call. Despite this simplicity, proper implementation of this system has been very sluggish.

The system has been overhauled by the FCC twice, once in 2001 then again in 2003, and various aspects of the system have been challenged and overturned by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on four different occasions. Even today, in 2010, thirteen years after the FCC's effective date of the per call compensation system, the system fails to function on occasion.

Because the system is designed to compensate PSPs for the services they provide the public, it is the PSPs who suffer the loss as a result of the system's imperfections. The principals of PSP Legal Services have participated as parties in many of the legal cases that resulted in the applicable legal precedent supporting our enterprise.

During the past decade, many payphone service providers fought long and hard in the civil tribunals, spending exorbitant amounts of money in the process, attempting to cure the system's failures. Some of the PSPs have even gone out of business in the process.Their legacy is our springboard.

For a detailed account of the history of the dial around compensation, including an explanation of what dial around actually is, please visit our dial around juggernaut page.