Engineer Restores Pay Phones For Free Public Use

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Patrick Schlott often finds himself in a cellular dead zone during his drive to work. 'You go down the road, you turn the corner and you're behind a mountain and you'll lose cell coverage pretty fast,' he says. The 31-year-old electrical engineer says poor reception is a common frustration for residents of Vermont's Orange County. To address this issue, he's providing his community with a new way to stay connected.

Schlott has taken old pay phones, modified them to make free calls, and set them up in three different towns across the county. He buys the phones secondhand from sites like eBay and Craigslist and restores them in his home workshop. With just an internet connection, these phones can make calls anywhere in the U.S. or Canada -- no coins required. And Schlott covers all the operating costs himself. 'It's cheap enough where I'm happy just footing the bill,' he says. 'You know, if I'm spending $20 a month on, say, Netflix, I could do that and provide phone service for the community. And to me, that's way more fun.' Hundreds of calls have been made since the first phone was installed back in March last year. 'I knew there would be some fringe cases where it would be really helpful,' says Schlott. 'But I never expected it to get daily use and for people to be this excited about it.'

'One of the cornerstones that I want to stick to is, no matter what happens on the backend, the calls will always be free,' he says. 'And I will figure out a way to make that happen.'

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