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.

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.

Until then, it got Internet via Burning Man itself through what they call the "participant network", which they still provide: 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.

With paying for ~60 hours of calls for the week it runs, I think it's still usually well under $100, though.

Here's a list they maintain of current devices: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/ATA_Devices

One of my favorites is to ask the person what's the most amazing thing they've seen that day, and you'll likely get widely varying answers given where they are.

But you could also call and try to sell someone an extended warranty for their couch without breaking. It doesn't matter as long as you (and hopefully they) have fun with it.

The bigger problem for this project is because of phone spam, fewer people will answer calls from unknown numbers, so a lot of those calls go to voice mail.

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.

It used to get a little bit of Internet directly from Burning Man itself via a 20 foot tower pointed near center camp, but now it just uses Starlink, which is easier for my campmates to set up without me and much more reliable.

For power, it is now plugged into a solar generator that is occasionally recharged from a gas generator.