aaron42net

The booth now is shut down for the year. And I have some stats to share:

For 2026 the booth was setup from Sunday, August 30 around 1pm to Sunday, September 6th at 6am, but was broken for a little over a day starting Thursday afternoon due to a failed power supply and a discovery that our spare was a dud.

Due to the widespread publicity, it was overwhelmed with incoming calls, receiving 33,400 total. Only 1,270 (3.8%) calls were answered for a total talk time of 44.5 hours, 1,600 (4.8%) weren’t answered within after 6 rings, and 30,500 calls (91.3%) got busy signals or other errors. Of the 7,200 unique phone numbers that tried to call, only 970 (13.5%) were able to actually talk to someone.

There were fewer outbound calls this year, presumably due to the booth being busy with incoming calls. There were 1,140 outbound calls to 650 different numbers in 30 countries, for a total talk time of 26.1 hours.

Fixed this. Thanks for the report.

I've implemented this. There's no random function with voip.ms, but there are time-based rules. So it'll play the Matrix easter egg about 1/90th of the day after no answer.

Currently, it looks like I have it configured to allow all destinations that are $0.40/minute or less with voip.ms's "value" routing. This is enough to call all numbers in ~120 countries and some numbers (usually landlines) in another ~70.

And there are occasionally people who have trouble with the concept of "free 5 minute call" (that it hangs up after) not meaning "just keep dialing back for an hour or two", even with a long line behind them. I can't ban specific outgoing numbers with voip.ms, but once I ended up just disabling all calls to the country that a problematic user kept coming back and repeatedly redialing.

That was the look I was going for, but the base is actually 1" plywood with a 45 degree bevel and rounded corners, painted with a few coats of a grey deck paint. There are 6 massive bolts holding the booth pedestal to the base. Assembled, the whole thing is pretty sturdy.

No worries. I'm happy you found it interesting enough to share, and that others found it interesting enough to upvote and ask questions about.

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.

Last year, it was roughly 2/3 outbound vs 1/3 inbound, based on total talk time in the 6.5 days it was set up.

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.

Anything or nothing.

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.

It has changed a bit in recent years, but there's still only very spotty cell service at Burning Man. Enough people can figure out how to look up a phone number that this phone still dials out thousands of times during the week.

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.

Yes, that wouldn't be hard with the normal voip.ms call routing.

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.

I figured out where the bad street name came from; it's apparently a Google AI Search hallucination. It's apparently what I get for not clicking through to read the relevant page on Burning Man's site.

A little of both. It was popular enough off of a Reddit post last year that people were hearing a lot of busy signals. I thought it might entertain some folks to see just how busy the phone has been in the last hour.