7 ms·

This phone is my project. I'm happy to answer questions.

aaron42net 12d ago
The booth now is shut down for the year. And I have some stats to share: For 2026 the booth was setup from Sunday, August 30 around 1pm to Sunday, September 6th at 6am, but was broken for a little over a day starting Thursday afternoon due to a failed power supply and a discovery that our spare was a dud. Due to the widespread publicity, it was overwhelmed with incoming calls, receiving 33,400 total. Only 1,270 (3.8%) calls were answered for a total talk time of 44.5 hours, 1,600 (4.8%) weren’t answered within after 6 rings, and 30,500 calls (91.3%) got busy signals or other errors. Of the 7,200 unique phone numbers that tried to call, only 970 (13.5%) were able to actually talk to someone. There were fewer outbound calls this year, presumably due to the booth being busy with incoming calls. There were 1,140 outbound calls to 650 different numbers in 30 countries, for a total talk time of 26.1 hours.
gregcohn 18d ago
Very cool project; thanks for making it.
ericwengrowski 18d ago
Nice dude, thanks for building it
echelon 18d ago
This is amazing and has me wishing we had pay phones again. Maybe they could come back and offer "free" service in high-density areas and fund via pre-roll ads or something. But perhaps the culture of remembering phone numbers is too far gone and it's easy enough to find charging. Thank you for making and posting about this!
- pgoggijr 18d ago
  NYC has something just like this - https://www.link.nyc/home.html https://www.link.nyc/home.html
- aaron42net 18d ago
  I think I've heard of at least a few groups dropping free-to-use phone booths in rural areas without much cell service, sans any form of revenue.
  - wiml 18d ago
    Futel runs a handful of non-pay payphones in and around NW Oregon, some urban and some rural. There are other regional organizations doing similar things.
- Fuzzwah 18d ago
  Here in Australia our once public phone company, telstra, have converted many phone boxes to be free to use and also provide a small wifi AP.
- bigfatkitten 18d ago
  Payphones in Australia have free national calls. Telstra, the formerly state owned incumbent telco is obliged under their universal service obligation to provide a certain number of payphones, but it costs more to collect the coins than the phones earn in revenue.
  - hhhAndrew 18d ago
    This is part of the picture. But IIUC Telstra is very keen to keep that "obligation". Why? Because along with it they 1. Are fairly free to decide where to put payphone (eg next time you are in the city, notice sometimes they are slightly impeding pedestrian traffic in the city), and 2. They are allowed to place and sell advertising on the sides which makes bank due to 1. Despite the above I love that my kid can just dial my number on any payphone, and they like prank calling me, and they have duly memorised my number .
andai 18d ago
Nice. I'm curious how it works? I don't know much about VoIP, I remember being amazed by Skype back in the day, that it could call landlines.
- aaron42net 18d ago
  The basics are that it's using a cheap VoIP adapter that you'd plug a classic touch-tone phone into, allowing it to make phone calls over the Internet through a low-cost telco provider called voip.ms. Here's a list they maintain of current devices: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/ATA_Devices https://wiki.voip.ms/article/ATA_Devices
niwtsol 18d ago
I've told you this before, but I'll tell you again - thank you for running this, has been delightful in my experience!
SamuelAdams 18d ago
Can you update the "did not answer" flow to, instead of six busy signals and hanging up, be the dialog to end of the Matrix (1999)? The film concludes with Neo talking into a phone booth phone to the audience and I think it would be fitting here as an Easter egg.
- par 16d ago
  For those in need of a refresher, the dialogue is "“I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you."
- aaron42net 18d ago
  Yes, that wouldn't be hard with the normal voip.ms call routing. But my intent was for it to be as visually and functionally identical as possible to a phone booth you would've found on a street corner a few decades ago, just in an unusual place (and free). I've avoided anything in the normal usage of it that would deviate from that.
  - dandellion 18d ago
    You could make it 99% of the time a normal phone booth and 1% you get the Matrix easter egg, that would be even more fun.
    - aaron42net 17d ago
      I've implemented this. There's no random function with voip.ms, but there are time-based rules. So it'll play the Matrix easter egg about 1/90th of the day after no answer.
    - drybjed 18d ago
      And the other 1%, a call from the Machine (Person of Interest) with a Dewey Decimal System number callout. It would be even better if the booth itself rang and when somebody nearby answered, you get the numbers.
chagaif 18d ago
such a cool project! does it show somewhere if the phone is busy? I can see it shows when the last call ended...
- aaron42net 18d ago
  Sadly, not easily. The voip.ms API can show me that the phone is logged in, and I can poll the phone bill ("call detail records") but that only shows calls after they've completed. But there isn't anything available for current call state that I can find.
solfox 18d ago
How has it evolved over the years? Certainly internet access on the playa has gotten easier than when you first launched it. What was the first connectivity solution?
- aaron42net 18d ago
  I've had to replace the handset (mic and speaker) and the LEDs in the sign a few times since 2013, but I've mostly left the hardware alone otherwise except switching to Starlink in 2022. Until then, it got Internet via Burning Man itself through what they call the "participant network", which they still provide: https://internet.burningman.org/ https://internet.burningman.org/ This consisted of setting up a Ubiquiti NanoBridge (then later NanoBeam) with their supplied config on top of a 20 foot tower aimed at the 60 foot radio tower near Center Camp. Sometimes they wouldn't provide the config or get the participant network running until like Tuesday or Wednesday of event week, it might at best provide 400kbit/sec total or have permanent 50% packet loss, or just be down for days at a time. It wasn't great. I hear it has drastically improved in recent years, but I haven't tried using it.
  - toomuchtodo 18d ago
    It’s been some time since I’ve been, but I had good luck with a directional antenna with a hotspot pointed at the closest T-Mobile tower (~12 miles in Gerlach if memory serves) if that might ever be relevant to your backhaul/uplink use cases. Great work!
ale42 18d ago
So nice to see such projects! Thank you for doing that.
cutoff 18d ago
I saw your Reddit post and decided to post it here (my first HN post). Didn't think it would end up front page, but love to see that people here are calling it and having nice chats with burners. My apologies if this blew up more than intended on your end.
- aaron42net 18d ago
  No worries. I'm happy you found it interesting enough to share, and that others found it interesting enough to upvote and ask questions about. The single phone line was mostly at capacity with the /r/BurningMan crowd trying to call, though. I suspect with several times as many people dialing, sadly that has to mean fewer people can succeed. Hopefully people are still having fun with it, though.
TZubiri 18d ago
Is the phone more used for inbound or outbound? Calling the phone seems fun, but I wouldn't want to get in the way of a bunch of people standing in line to make a call, or use it for emergencies.
- aaron42net 18d ago
  Last year, it was roughly 2/3 outbound vs 1/3 inbound, based on total talk time in the 6.5 days it was set up. There were 1,460 outbound calls successfully made to 835 different numbers in 23 countries, with a total talk time of 34.8 hours. (This is down about 40% from peak years ago, now that there's more cell service and Internet available at Burning Man.) There were also 5,658 inbound call attempts, and 676 (12%) were answered with a total talk time of 17.2 hours. 4,070 incoming calls got a busy signal and 912 got no answer. And you can't make an emergency call on it (which is written in all caps on it); flagging down someone with a radio is the right way to get emergency services out there.
  - walrus01 17d ago
    Did you restrict any of the expensive international destinations in the voip.ms control panel? I imagine you wouldn't get that many people who wanted to call really weird places and have a 2 hour conversation from the playa, but some very costly destinations in per minute rate do exist in the voip.ms rate table.
    - aaron42net 17d ago
      Currently, it looks like I have it configured to allow all destinations that are $0.40/minute or less with voip.ms's "value" routing. This is enough to call all numbers in ~120 countries and some numbers (usually landlines) in another ~70. And there are occasionally people who have trouble with the concept of "free 5 minute call" (that it hangs up after) not meaning "just keep dialing back for an hour or two", even with a long line behind them. I can't ban specific outgoing numbers with voip.ms, but once I ended up just disabling all calls to the country that a problematic user kept coming back and repeatedly redialing.
ellis0n 18d ago
I like your idea and I was really impressed by the film The Matrix, but how can we know that it’s not another voice agent?
jonahhorowitz 18d ago
In 2003, my first burn, I camped next to embassy around 7:30 and esplanade. One of the guys in my camp brought a VoIP phone and connected it to whatever internet was available at the time. The phone was a lifeline for many people, back in the days when communicating from the playa was incredibly hard. Your version is way cooler. Thanks for bringing a little magic to the playa.
teiferer 18d ago
So cool! Thanks for this! One detail about the status page: the rows read upside down. "Online Phone connection". Once you realize what it means your brain can flip it, but the more natural order would be "Phone connection Online".
- aaron42net 16d ago
  Fixed this. Thanks for the report.
foo12bar 18d ago
Is the base really made of cement?
- aaron42net 17d ago
  That was the look I was going for, but the base is actually 1" plywood with a 45 degree bevel and rounded corners, painted with a few coats of a grey deck paint. There are 6 massive bolts holding the booth pedestal to the base. Assembled, the whole thing is pretty sturdy.
ChrisMarshallNY 17d ago
You need to have a rotary dial on it. ;) Good show!

The booth now is shut down for the year. And I have some stats to share: For 2026 the booth was setup from Sunday, August 30 around 1pm to Sunday, September 6th at 6am, but was broken for a little over a day starting Thursday afternoon due to a failed power supply and a discovery that our spare was a dud. Due to the widespread publicity, it was overwhelmed with incoming calls, receiving 33,400 total. Only 1,270 (3.8%) calls were answered for a total talk time of 44.5 hours, 1,600 (4.8%) weren’t answered within after 6 rings, and 30,500 calls (91.3%) got busy signals or other errors. Of the 7,200 unique phone numbers that tried to call, only 970 (13.5%) were able to actually talk to someone. There were fewer outbound calls this year, presumably due to the booth being busy with incoming calls. There were 1,140 outbound calls to 650 different numbers in 30 countries, for a total talk time of 26.1 hours.

gregcohn 18d ago

Very cool project; thanks for making it.

ericwengrowski 18d ago

Nice dude, thanks for building it

echelon 18d ago

This is amazing and has me wishing we had pay phones again. Maybe they could come back and offer "free" service in high-density areas and fund via pre-roll ads or something. But perhaps the culture of remembering phone numbers is too far gone and it's easy enough to find charging. Thank you for making and posting about this!

pgoggijr 18d ago
NYC has something just like this - https://www.link.nyc/home.html https://www.link.nyc/home.html
aaron42net 18d ago
I think I've heard of at least a few groups dropping free-to-use phone booths in rural areas without much cell service, sans any form of revenue.
- wiml 18d ago
  Futel runs a handful of non-pay payphones in and around NW Oregon, some urban and some rural. There are other regional organizations doing similar things.
Fuzzwah 18d ago
Here in Australia our once public phone company, telstra, have converted many phone boxes to be free to use and also provide a small wifi AP.
bigfatkitten 18d ago
Payphones in Australia have free national calls. Telstra, the formerly state owned incumbent telco is obliged under their universal service obligation to provide a certain number of payphones, but it costs more to collect the coins than the phones earn in revenue.
- hhhAndrew 18d ago
  This is part of the picture. But IIUC Telstra is very keen to keep that "obligation". Why? Because along with it they 1. Are fairly free to decide where to put payphone (eg next time you are in the city, notice sometimes they are slightly impeding pedestrian traffic in the city), and 2. They are allowed to place and sell advertising on the sides which makes bank due to 1. Despite the above I love that my kid can just dial my number on any payphone, and they like prank calling me, and they have duly memorised my number .

andai 18d ago

Nice. I'm curious how it works? I don't know much about VoIP, I remember being amazed by Skype back in the day, that it could call landlines.

aaron42net 18d ago
The basics are that it's using a cheap VoIP adapter that you'd plug a classic touch-tone phone into, allowing it to make phone calls over the Internet through a low-cost telco provider called voip.ms. Here's a list they maintain of current devices: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/ATA_Devices https://wiki.voip.ms/article/ATA_Devices

niwtsol 18d ago

I've told you this before, but I'll tell you again - thank you for running this, has been delightful in my experience!

SamuelAdams 18d ago

Can you update the "did not answer" flow to, instead of six busy signals and hanging up, be the dialog to end of the Matrix (1999)? The film concludes with Neo talking into a phone booth phone to the audience and I think it would be fitting here as an Easter egg.

par 16d ago
For those in need of a refresher, the dialogue is "“I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you."
aaron42net 18d ago
Yes, that wouldn't be hard with the normal voip.ms call routing. But my intent was for it to be as visually and functionally identical as possible to a phone booth you would've found on a street corner a few decades ago, just in an unusual place (and free). I've avoided anything in the normal usage of it that would deviate from that.
- dandellion 18d ago
  You could make it 99% of the time a normal phone booth and 1% you get the Matrix easter egg, that would be even more fun.
  - aaron42net 17d ago
    I've implemented this. There's no random function with voip.ms, but there are time-based rules. So it'll play the Matrix easter egg about 1/90th of the day after no answer.
  - drybjed 18d ago
    And the other 1%, a call from the Machine (Person of Interest) with a Dewey Decimal System number callout. It would be even better if the booth itself rang and when somebody nearby answered, you get the numbers.

chagaif 18d ago

such a cool project! does it show somewhere if the phone is busy? I can see it shows when the last call ended...

aaron42net 18d ago
Sadly, not easily. The voip.ms API can show me that the phone is logged in, and I can poll the phone bill ("call detail records") but that only shows calls after they've completed. But there isn't anything available for current call state that I can find.

solfox 18d ago

How has it evolved over the years? Certainly internet access on the playa has gotten easier than when you first launched it. What was the first connectivity solution?

aaron42net 18d ago
I've had to replace the handset (mic and speaker) and the LEDs in the sign a few times since 2013, but I've mostly left the hardware alone otherwise except switching to Starlink in 2022. Until then, it got Internet via Burning Man itself through what they call the "participant network", which they still provide: https://internet.burningman.org/ https://internet.burningman.org/ This consisted of setting up a Ubiquiti NanoBridge (then later NanoBeam) with their supplied config on top of a 20 foot tower aimed at the 60 foot radio tower near Center Camp. Sometimes they wouldn't provide the config or get the participant network running until like Tuesday or Wednesday of event week, it might at best provide 400kbit/sec total or have permanent 50% packet loss, or just be down for days at a time. It wasn't great. I hear it has drastically improved in recent years, but I haven't tried using it.
- toomuchtodo 18d ago
  It’s been some time since I’ve been, but I had good luck with a directional antenna with a hotspot pointed at the closest T-Mobile tower (~12 miles in Gerlach if memory serves) if that might ever be relevant to your backhaul/uplink use cases. Great work!

ale42 18d ago

So nice to see such projects! Thank you for doing that.

cutoff 18d ago

I saw your Reddit post and decided to post it here (my first HN post). Didn't think it would end up front page, but love to see that people here are calling it and having nice chats with burners. My apologies if this blew up more than intended on your end.

aaron42net 18d ago
No worries. I'm happy you found it interesting enough to share, and that others found it interesting enough to upvote and ask questions about. The single phone line was mostly at capacity with the /r/BurningMan crowd trying to call, though. I suspect with several times as many people dialing, sadly that has to mean fewer people can succeed. Hopefully people are still having fun with it, though.

TZubiri 18d ago

Is the phone more used for inbound or outbound? Calling the phone seems fun, but I wouldn't want to get in the way of a bunch of people standing in line to make a call, or use it for emergencies.

aaron42net 18d ago
Last year, it was roughly 2/3 outbound vs 1/3 inbound, based on total talk time in the 6.5 days it was set up. There were 1,460 outbound calls successfully made to 835 different numbers in 23 countries, with a total talk time of 34.8 hours. (This is down about 40% from peak years ago, now that there's more cell service and Internet available at Burning Man.) There were also 5,658 inbound call attempts, and 676 (12%) were answered with a total talk time of 17.2 hours. 4,070 incoming calls got a busy signal and 912 got no answer. And you can't make an emergency call on it (which is written in all caps on it); flagging down someone with a radio is the right way to get emergency services out there.
- walrus01 17d ago
  Did you restrict any of the expensive international destinations in the voip.ms control panel? I imagine you wouldn't get that many people who wanted to call really weird places and have a 2 hour conversation from the playa, but some very costly destinations in per minute rate do exist in the voip.ms rate table.
  - aaron42net 17d ago
    Currently, it looks like I have it configured to allow all destinations that are $0.40/minute or less with voip.ms's "value" routing. This is enough to call all numbers in ~120 countries and some numbers (usually landlines) in another ~70. And there are occasionally people who have trouble with the concept of "free 5 minute call" (that it hangs up after) not meaning "just keep dialing back for an hour or two", even with a long line behind them. I can't ban specific outgoing numbers with voip.ms, but once I ended up just disabling all calls to the country that a problematic user kept coming back and repeatedly redialing.

ellis0n 18d ago

I like your idea and I was really impressed by the film The Matrix, but how can we know that it’s not another voice agent?

jonahhorowitz 18d ago

In 2003, my first burn, I camped next to embassy around 7:30 and esplanade. One of the guys in my camp brought a VoIP phone and connected it to whatever internet was available at the time. The phone was a lifeline for many people, back in the days when communicating from the playa was incredibly hard. Your version is way cooler. Thanks for bringing a little magic to the playa.

teiferer 18d ago

So cool! Thanks for this! One detail about the status page: the rows read upside down. "Online Phone connection". Once you realize what it means your brain can flip it, but the more natural order would be "Phone connection Online".

aaron42net 16d ago
Fixed this. Thanks for the report.

foo12bar 18d ago

Is the base really made of cement?

aaron42net 17d ago
That was the look I was going for, but the base is actually 1" plywood with a 45 degree bevel and rounded corners, painted with a few coats of a grey deck paint. There are 6 massive bolts holding the booth pedestal to the base. Assembled, the whole thing is pretty sturdy.

ChrisMarshallNY 17d ago

You need to have a rotary dial on it. ;) Good show!