Rural Vermont will see 150 payphones reactivated this summer after the state awarded a $1.3 million contract to Waitsfield Telecom to convert legacy coin boxes into Voice-over-IP units, according to spectrum.ieee.org.
The project began when the Vermont Public Utility Commission solicited bids to restore service along 200 miles of highway where cellular coverage is spotty. Waitsfield Telecom, a 35-employee cooperative founded in 1906, proposed retrofitting existing housings with Grandstream HT802 adapters that route calls over its fiber backbone. Installation crews started in May and expect to finish by August, linking each kiosk to a cloud switch that accepts coins, prepaid cards, or dial-around codes, as reported by spectrum.ieee.org.
Vermont joins Alaska and West Virginia in subsidizing public telecom infrastructure after the FCC’s 2022 order ended legacy carrier-of-last-resort obligations. The state’s $1.3 million allocation—drawn from the $42 million federal Capital Projects Fund—works out to roughly $8,700 per kiosk, comparable to the $7,200-per-unit cost of New York’s 2014 LinkNYC overhaul and well below the $12,000 average for new rural cell towers cited in industry filings. By keeping copper pairs dormant and shifting to VoIP, Vermont cuts annual maintenance costs from $3,000 to $400 per site, according to Waitsfield’s filing with the commission.
Waitsfield Telecom plans to activate the first 50 units by July 4 and will publish a live map of operational locations at vtpublicphone.com. Regulators will review call-volume data next January to decide whether to expand the program to ski-resort parking lots and trail heads, a decision that could unlock an additional $500,000 in state matching funds, according to the utility commission’s timeline.