Sep 02, 2026 07:00:00

'Playa Phone' allows you to make free calls for 5 minutes to almost anywhere in the world.

Every year from late August to September,

Burning Man is a massive event held in the wilderness of Nevada, USA. Tens of thousands of people build a town on the middle of nowhere, live together, and then the entire town is dismantled in just one week. During Burning Man, a phone booth called ' Playa Phone ' is set up where you can make free calls for 5 minutes to almost anywhere in the world.

Playa Phone
https://playaphone.com/

Thousands of Burning Man attendees use this phone to call home
https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/burning-man-pay-phone-19736797.php

Playa Phone is a phone booth set up at the Burning Man site that anyone can use for free. It's a regular phone booth, but the internal mechanism has been modified so that it doesn't accept payments and allows calls to be made via the internet.

You can make free calls to almost anywhere in the world for 5 minutes from your Playa Phone, and since the Playa Phone also has a phone number, you can call it and chat with random Burning Man participants.

The Playa Phone page records your usage history. As of the time of writing, the most recent call was 12 minutes ago, and the total call time over the past hour was 17 minutes and 59 seconds.

A 2024 article from the San Francisco-based news site

SFGATE provides a more detailed report on actually using the Playa Phone. Below is a close-up shot of the Playa Phone.

The Playa Phone is located in front of the 'Temple of

the Flying Spaghetti Monster, ' a long-running Burning Man camp led by technology experts.

The Playa Phone was conceived in 2013 by Burning Man participant Aaron Hopkins. Hopkins wanted to call his young children at home from the Burning Man site, but because mobile phone service is generally unavailable at the site, and because the event's philosophy emphasizes meeting others, forming communities, and helping each other, he was reprimanded by other participants for using his mobile phone during the event.

Hopkins modified an old coin-operated telephone and replaced the circuit board with a push-button type connected to a VoIP adapter to create the Playa Phone. When installed at Burning Man, it receives power from an Ethernet cable buried underground and makes calls over the internet via a VoIP provider. For many years, they used the service at Burning Man's center camp, but since 2023 they have switched to Starlink, which has made it more stable.

Hopkins told SFGATE in an interview, 'I thought that if we could connect with the real world, even for just a few minutes, it would significantly improve the time spent at Burning Man, and I wasn't the only one who felt that way. I thought that if we turned it into an art project, it would be more easily accepted by people.'

Since Hopkins will not be attending Burning Man in 2026, Ted Schundler, an IT expert from San Francisco, will be bringing and setting up the equipment.

According to a post by Hopkins on Reddit , 1,460 calls were successfully made to 835 contacts in 23 countries during Burning Man 2025. Additionally, 676 incoming calls to Playa Phone were successful. With an incoming call success rate of only 12%, 72% were busy and 16% were unanswered, Hopkins advises, 'Don't worry if you have to call back multiple times.' Hopkins also appeared on the social news site Hacker News, answering various questions and requests.