An engineer restored dead payphones into free community phones for Vermont dead zones

In Vermont's Orange County, cell coverage dies behind every hill — electrical engineer Patrick Schlott, 31, loses it on his own drive to work. So he has been rebuilding the infrastructure everyone else scrapped: he buys old payphones secondhand on eBay and Craigslist, restores them in his home workshop, and installs them for free public use in three towns across the county.

The retrofit is simple in principle: with just an internet connection, the phones can call anywhere in the US or Canada — no coins required. Schlott pays all operating costs himself. '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.'

Since the first phone went up in March 2024 outside a general store in Tunbridge, hundreds of calls have been made — drivers with broken-down cars, and at the Thetford Center public library, the busiest site, kids calling parents for rides or just checking in. In June, Vermont voted to ban phones in schools from the 2026–27 academic year, and Schlott says requests for his phones are already arriving. His one rule: whatever happens with funding, the calls stay free.

The hardware problem was solved a century ago; the real insight was that the running cost of a community phone network is trivially small for one person.

Free at the point of use matters most in emergencies — the people who need a phone (stranded drivers, kids without one) are exactly the people without one.

Secondhand markets made the capex near zero: retired payphones cost furniture prices, not infrastructure prices.

Vermont's school phone ban turns a nice-to-have into a coming necessity, and demand is arriving on its own.

When coverage fails, look for the retired technology that still works: old networks plus one cheap connection can beat 'no service' — and one person can fund it.

Schlott has received some donations to sustain the project and says his one-man funding model may need to adapt if it grows. He has committed to keeping the calls free regardless of what happens on the backend, and expects demand to rise once Vermont's school phone ban takes effect in 2026–27.