The Man Behind the Phones: A Side Project With a Real-World Purpose
Patrick Schlott spends his days engineering electric aircraft. As an electrical engineer at Beta Technologies in South Burlington, Vermont, he helps build eVTOL planes — the kind of technology that exists at the outermost edge of what’s currently possible. Then he goes home and restores pay phones.
The contradiction is the point. Schlott, 32, has installed free-to-use pay phones at over half a dozen locations across Vermont, routing calls through local internet connections via Voice over Internet Protocol gateways. The phones cost users nothing — no coins, no accounts, no apps. Anyone can pick up and call anywhere in the United States or Canada.
Schlott didn’t invent this idea from scratch. He drew direct inspiration from Futel and PhilTel, two existing free-phone community projects that have quietly built small networks of public phones in cities like Portland and Philadelphia. Their existence matters because it reframes what Schlott is doing: this isn’t one eccentric engineer’s nostalgia project. It’s a recognizable model, a civic-tech approach that treats communication as infrastructure rather than product.
That distinction — public infrastructure versus commercial venture — is what most coverage of Schlott’s phones misses. These aren’t pay phones in the retro-novelty sense. They carry no revenue motive. No carrier profits from a call made on one. The phones exist because Schlott decided a community needed them and built the thing himself.
That posture puts his project in sharp contrast to the telecommunications industry’s standard operating mode, where coverage gaps persist for years while companies negotiate subsidies and liability and return on investment. Schlott skipped that entire apparatus. He found old hardware, connected it to broadband that already existed, and made it work. The phones function not despite their simplicity but because of it — and the man who built them also helps design aircraft that can take off vertically. He knows exactly what he’s choosing to build, and why.
What Is VoIP and Why Does It Make This Possible Now?
Voice over Internet Protocol — VoIP — routes voice calls through a broadband connection instead of dedicated copper telephone lines. That single technical shift eliminates the two costs that killed the original pay phone industry: expensive carrier contracts with traditional telcos and the ongoing maintenance burden of physical copper infrastructure. Strip those away, and the barrier to running a functional public phone terminal drops to almost nothing.
Patrick Schlott’s Vermont phones demonstrate exactly how low that barrier now sits. Each unit pairs a restored vintage handset with a VoIP gateway that connects to whatever local internet service is available at the installation site. The gateway converts analog audio into digital data packets, ships them over broadband, and delivers a clear call anywhere in the United States or Canada — all without a coin, a telco contract, or a single foot of copper wire running to a central office.
This is the detail most coverage glosses over. These phones are not decorative. They are not nostalgia installations or art projects bolted to walls for aesthetic effect. The familiar steel housing holds a fully operational modern communication endpoint. The hardware is vintage; the underlying call architecture is contemporary. A 1970s Bell System shell runs the same protocol stack that powers Zoom, Google Voice, and every corporate phone system that abandoned landlines in the last decade.
That distinction matters because it explains why this model scales where traditional pay phone economics never could. A community organization, a local business, or a single motivated engineer can now deploy a public phone for the cost of a broadband subscription and a refurbished handset sourced from an estate sale or surplus warehouse. No negotiating with AT&T. No waiting on a telecom company to run new lines to a rural general store. The complexity that once required a corporate infrastructure budget now fits inside a small plastic gateway device that costs less than a monthly cell phone bill.
Rural Vermont as a Case Study: Where Mobile Fails, Landlines Return
Vermont is not a large state, but its hills and valleys create wireless dead zones that carriers have never found economical to fix. A hiker loses signal before reaching the trailhead. A driver breaks down on a back road with no way to call for help. These are not edge cases — they are routine realities for residents and visitors across the state.
Patrick Schlott, a 32-year-old electrical engineer at South Burlington-based eVTOL manufacturer Beta Technologies, built a direct answer to that problem. He restored decommissioned pay phone hardware and installed free-to-use terminals at more than half a dozen locations across Vermont. Each phone routes calls anywhere in the United States or Canada through a VoIP gateway connected to whatever local internet infrastructure already exists at that site — fiber, fixed wireless, whatever is available. No cell signal required.
That last point exposes the structural flaw mobile carriers have spent decades papering over. The Federal Communications Commission’s coverage maps have historically overstated rural signal availability, and even corrected maps reveal a simple economic truth: building and maintaining cell towers in low-density terrain costs more than it returns. Federal broadband subsidies have moved the needle in some areas, but coverage gaps persist because the subsidy programs target broadband buildout, not voice reliability specifically.
VoIP terminals sidestep that entire problem. If a community already has a fiber line running to a general store or a town hall — infrastructure that federal and state grants have made more common in Vermont over the last decade — a restored pay phone terminal can sit on top of that connection and provide reliable voice calls at essentially no incremental infrastructure cost. The phone does not wait for a carrier to decide the return on investment pencils out. It works today, with what is already there.
That is the practical case for what Schlott built. It is not nostalgia. It is a fixed, publicly accessible communication point in places where the mobile network made a promise it never kept.
The Missing Context: A Quiet Movement of Community-Owned Telecom
Patrick Schlott didn’t invent this model. He borrowed it from Futel, a Portland-based project that has operated free VoIP payphones in Oregon and beyond for years, and PhilTel, which built a similar free-call network across Philadelphia. Both projects share the same architecture: salvaged hardware, open-source software, a broadband connection, and a deliberate rejection of the carrier model that assumes communication access is a product to be sold rather than infrastructure to be shared. Schlott took that blueprint and planted it in rural Vermont.
Most reporting on his project treats it as a charming anachronism — engineer rescues retro technology, quirky story, move on. That framing misses what’s actually happening. Any community with a broadband connection can replicate what Schlott built. The cost is low. The technical barrier is not steep for anyone with basic networking knowledge. The phones become public infrastructure owned and operated outside corporate or government channels, accountable to the people who install and maintain them.
That structure has a precedent that predates the smartphone by over a century. When Bell Telephone expanded in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it concentrated on cities where density made profit easy. Rural communities had no service and no prospect of getting it. So they built their own. Farmer-owned telephone cooperatives strung their own lines, operated their own switchboards, and created functional networks that Bell had no interest in building. At the peak of this movement, thousands of independent rural telephone companies operated across the United States. Many survive today as cooperatives.
Schlott’s payphones rhyme with that history directly. The carrier system again failed to serve rural users — this time through spotty mobile coverage rather than no copper lines — and an engineer-activist filled the gap with community infrastructure. The difference is that the current template is cheaper, faster to deploy, and easier to replicate. A working payphone needs a refurbished handset, a VoIP adapter, and a host location willing to share its internet connection. No spectrum license. No tower. No carrier negotiation. That simplicity is exactly what makes it scalable and exactly what mainstream coverage keeps failing to mention.
What This Really Means: Low-Tech Resilience in a High-Tech World
Patrick Schlott’s VoIP payphones expose a straightforward truth that Silicon Valley has spent decades obscuring: simpler infrastructure often outperforms complex infrastructure when conditions get harsh.
A hardwired public phone carries none of the vulnerabilities that quietly make smartphones useless during emergencies. No battery to drain. No data plan to lapse. No cell tower to knock offline when an ice storm takes down the grid. When a northeastern winter does its worst — the kind that regularly isolates Vermont communities for days — a phone bolted to a wall and connected to a local broadband line can keep working while every device in someone’s pocket goes dark. That is not nostalgia. That is redundancy, and it is exactly what emergency communication systems are supposed to deliver.
The project also punctures a core assumption embedded in how telecom policy gets made: that newer and more technically complex solutions are inherently superior. Starlink satellites, 5G buildouts, and rural wireless expansion attract billions in federal investment and constant headline attention. Schlott built his network with restored hardware, a VoIP gateway, and a local internet connection. The cost per unit is a fraction of any satellite terminal. The barrier to use is zero — no account, no subscription, no learning curve.
That gap between complexity and effectiveness points toward a concrete policy question. Municipal broadband projects are expanding across rural America, funded in part by the $65 billion allocated through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for broadband access. As those networks come online, the case grows for attaching a simple requirement: public VoIP terminals at fixed community locations — libraries, town halls, general stores — as a condition of funding or a line item in deployment grants.
Schlott’s model is not a full answer to rural connectivity failure. But it demonstrates that durable, community-scale communication infrastructure does not require waiting for the next satellite constellation or the next carrier promise. It requires a working internet connection, a repurposed phone, and someone willing to install it.
What Comes Next: Scaling the Idea Without Killing Its Soul
Patrick Schlott’s network works because Schlott makes it work. That’s the project’s greatest strength and its most honest vulnerability. Volunteer-built infrastructure carries a single point of failure — the volunteer. If Schlott relocates, burns out, or simply moves on to the next project, the phones go dark. No dispatch center, no maintenance crew, no contractual obligation to keep the lines open. That fragility deserves acknowledgment before anyone holds up this model as a scalable template.
The fix isn’t to hand the project to a corporation. It’s to embed it in institutions that already have staying power. Vermont’s town libraries, municipal offices, and the growing number of community broadband cooperatives operating across the state represent natural stewards. A library that already provides free internet access has the infrastructure, the public mandate, and the foot traffic to host and maintain a VoIP pay phone. A broadband co-op already manages shared telecom infrastructure on behalf of its members — adding a phone node is a modest extension of that mission, not a reinvention of it.
What Schlott has built is a proof of concept with three things that public funding applications demand: demonstrated demand, proven technical feasibility, and documented community goodwill. The phones are used. The hardware works. Local hosts agreed to participate. Those three facts, assembled into a coherent grant proposal, could attract support from state digital equity programs or federal broadband funding streams — neither of which requires a Silicon Valley intermediary to unlock.
The model scales not by growing into a startup, but by replicating its logic across other under-served rural communities where the same three ingredients exist. A town in rural Maine or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan faces the same coverage gaps, the same aging population that relies on landline-style communication, and the same surplus of old pay phone hardware sitting in warehouses. Schlott’s project didn’t invent a new technology — it applied a cheap, proven one to a neglected problem. That’s exactly the kind of solution that outlasts the venture capital cycle, provided someone takes the institutional step of making sure it doesn’t depend on any single person’s continued enthusiasm.
