Now THIS is cool.
Brad Templeton set up a free phone booth in the middle of the Nevada desert at the Burning Man Festival. He used a used phone booth, batteries, VoIP, 802.11 and a satellite uplink and documented both how he built it as well as how it was used.
The Black Rock Desert is where the rocket cars broke the sound barrier. It’s a perfectly flat dry lakebed, the location miles from the nearest village of Gerlach, and about 90 miles from Reno, the nearest significant city.
playaphone.jpg
(537 x 1024 – 116K)
In other words, it’s about the last place you would expect to find a phone booth, which is why I had to build one. Ideally I wanted a traditional “superman” style booth, and those can be found, but cost a fortune to ship, so we went with a more modern pedestal style phone. The goal was to have the phone just sitting there, mounted on the desert floor, connected to nothing, yet working, just where it shouldn’t.
We did it, and the results were amazing and surprisingly emotional. People refused to believe it, then cried out with joy when it became real. In spite of problems, about 1600 calls were made all over the world.
Yet another step towards the ubiquity of TCP/IP…
Free phone booth at Burning Man [templetons.com]