May 17, 2026
Call Me, Maybe, From 1987
VoIP Brings Back Old-Fashioned Pay Phones to Rural Vermont
Vermont’s free pay phones are charming locals while commenters argue over what to even call them
TLDR: An engineer is installing restored public phones in rural Vermont so people can make free calls where cell service is spotty, giving old hardware a new purpose. Commenters loved the throwback idea but instantly bickered over the name, joked about the wording, and raised privacy worries about future phone rules.
A Vermont engineer has done the unthinkable: he made pay phones cool again. Patrick Schlott is restoring old public phones and planting them around rural Vermont so anyone can make free calls across the U.S. and Canada. The idea is surprisingly practical in places where cell service can vanish, and one real-life story gave it extra emotional weight: a woman in a crisis reportedly walked miles to a general store and could have really used a phone. Suddenly, this isn’t just nostalgia bait — it’s a small-town safety net.
But the comment section? Absolutely could not resist turning this into a debate club. One faction got hung up on the phrase “free-to-use pay phones,” calling it a linguistic crime scene. Several commenters basically said: if it’s free, it’s not a pay phone, it’s a public phone, thank you very much. Others were less interested in word games and more in future government rules, with one person worrying that proposed regulations could turn a simple phone call into an ID-checking headache. That injected a little civil-liberties drama into an otherwise wholesome retro-tech story.
And then, in true internet fashion, some people skipped the policy panic and dictionary war entirely to deliver the purest possible verdict: “dudes rock.” Honestly? That may be the comment-thread champion. The vibe here is part admiration, part nitpicking, part nostalgia, and part comedy — which is exactly what happens when old tech comes back looking weirdly useful.
Key Points
- •Patrick Schlott has restored and installed more than half a dozen free public pay phones across Vermont.
- •The phones allow coinless calls anywhere in the United States and Canada by routing calls through local internet connections using VoIP gateways.
- •Schlott said the idea began in early 2023 after finding old phone equipment and learning about devices that convert digital VoIP lines to analog.
- •The first installation was placed at the North Tunbridge General Store in March 2024 after discussions with owners Mike and Lois Gross.
- •To make older phones work, Schlott uses loop-start compatible hardware with ATAs, SIP gateways, or media gateways connected to a VoIP telephone service.