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| Formation | 2014 |
|---|---|
| Founders | Karl Anderson, Elijah St. Clair |
| Headquarters | Portland, Oregon |
| Services | Telecommunications |
| Website | futel.net |
Futel is a public arts organization in Portland, Oregon dedicated to preserving and maintaining public telephone hardware and offering free phone and basic information services. [1] Futel was founded by Karl Anderson, a former software engineer, and Elijah St. Clair. [2]
Karl Anderson stated that one motivation for the project was to explore the idea of urban furniture. Other reasons were to preserve an important part of hacker history, and to salvage and re-use manufactured items at the end of their lifecycle. [3] The original Futel phones were set up in Portland, Oregon. The organization cleans and repurposes old public payphones which are often salvaged from Craigslist or scrappers. Using interface boxes, they are converted into VoIP phones which are made available publicly, with no cost for phone calls. [4] [5] Anderson has said the service runs on "Asterisk and OpenVPN and a lot of scripts." [6]
The payphones operate using publicly-available internet connections. [7] The phones have automated phone trees and users can make a call to local social services, to a weather forecast line, or access local transit information. [8] Volunteers act as telephone operators, offering information about the Futel service, or are available for conversation. [9] Users using Futel's phones may also access voicemail boxes. [1] The system has a "wildcard line" where people can listen to samples of audio left on the main voicemail line along with commentary from Anderson and others. [3]
In February 2021, there were 10 Futel phones in Portland and 3 in other cities. [10] Phones were set up in Detroit and Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Long Beach, Washington. [11] [8] The organization has provided free phone service for a Portland-area homeless encampment after receiving funding from the Awesome Foundation. [12] [1] In 2019 the organization reported their phones being used to make 12,000 phone calls. [13] Futel also said their usage went up and not down during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic when they outfitted their phone kiosks with handwashing stations and used volunteers to keep the phones clean. [10]
The project is funded is primarily through grants and is staffed with volunteers. [8] [13] The project has inspired others such as the PhilTel project in Philadelphia. [14] Futel publishes a zine called Party Line. [15]
A telephone card, calling card or phonecard for short, is a credit card-size plastic or paper card used to pay for telephone services. It is not necessary to have the physical card except with a stored-value system; knowledge of the access telephone number to dial and the PIN is sufficient. Standard cards which can be purchased and used without any sort of account facility give a fixed amount of credit and are discarded when used up; rechargeable cards can be topped up, or collect payment in arrears. The system for payment and the way in which the card is used to place a telephone call vary from card to card.
Telemarketing is a method of direct marketing in which a salesperson solicits prospective customers to buy products, subscriptions or services, either over the phone or through a subsequent face to face or web conferencing appointment scheduled during the call. Telemarketing can also include recorded sales pitches programmed to be played over the phone via automatic dialing.
A payphone is typically a coin-operated public telephone, often located in a telephone booth or in high-traffic public areas. Prepayment is required by inserting coins or telephone tokens, swiping a credit or debit card, or using a telephone card.
The red telephone box, a telephone kiosk for a public telephone designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, is a familiar sight on the streets of the United Kingdom, its associated Crown Dependencies, British Overseas Territories and Malta. Despite a reduction in their numbers in recent years, the traditional British red telephone kiosk can still be seen in many places throughout the UK, and in current or former British colonies around the world. The colour red was chosen to make them easy to spot.
The Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet) is a public agency that operates mass transit in a region that spans most of the Portland metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Oregon. Created in 1969 by the Oregon legislature, the district replaced five private bus companies that operated in the three counties: Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas. TriMet started operating a light rail system, MAX, in 1986, which has since been expanded to five lines that now cover 59.7 miles (96.1 km), as well as the WES Commuter Rail line in 2009. It also provides the operators and maintenance personnel for the city of Portland-owned Portland Streetcar system. In 2023, the system had a ridership of 62,055,600, or about 196,900 per weekday as of the fourth quarter of 2023.
A voicemail system is a computer-based system that allows people to leave a recorded message when the recipient is unable to answer the phone. The caller is prompted to leave a message and the recipient can retrieve said message at a later time.
A telephone booth, telephone kiosk, telephone call box, telephone box or public call box is a tiny structure furnished with a payphone and designed for a telephone user's convenience; usually the user steps into the booth and closes the booth door while using the payphone inside.
Phone fraud, or more generally communications fraud, is the use of telecommunications products or services with the intention of illegally acquiring money from, or failing to pay, a telecommunication company or its customers.
In the United Kingdom, telephone numbers are administered by the Office of Communications (Ofcom). For this purpose, Ofcom established a telephone numbering plan, known as the National Telephone Numbering Plan, which is the system for assigning telephone numbers to subscriber stations.
The Phone Losers of America (PLA) is an internet prank call community founded in 1994 as a phone phreaking and hacking e-zine. Today the PLA hosts a prank call podcast called the Snow Plow Show which it has hosted since 2012.
Gizmo5 was a voice over IP communications network and a proprietary freeware soft phone for that network. On November 12, 2009, Google announced that it had acquired Gizmo5. On March 4, 2011, Google announced that the service would be discontinued as of April 3, 2011.
Free Geek is a technology related non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon, launched on April 22, 2000. It started as a public event at Pioneer Courthouse Square. In September 2000, it opened a permanent facility as a drop off site for electronic waste. In January 2001, local newspaper The Oregonian ran an article advertising their free computer program for volunteers, which became so successful that they had to start a waiting list. They currently have over 2,000 active volunteers per year.
Cascade Policy Institute is a non-profit and non-partisan American libertarian think tank based in Oregon that focuses on state and local issues. Founded in 1991, the institute advocates limited government in cost and size, and promotes privatization and other free market alternatives to government services. Cascade is a member of the State Policy Network, a network of conservative and libertarian think tanks in the United States and Canada.
Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U.S. phone number to Google Account customers in the U.S. and Google Workspace customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the contiguous United States. It is used for call forwarding and voicemail services, voice and text messaging, as well as U.S. and international calls. Calls are forwarded to the phone number that each user must configure in the account web portal. Users can answer and receive calls on any of the phones configured to ring in the web portal. While answering a call, the user can switch between the configured phones. Subscribers in the United States can make outgoing calls to domestic and international destinations. The service is configured and maintained by users in a web-based application, similar in style to Google's email service Gmail, or Android and iOS applications on smartphones or tablets.
Telephone numbers in the Philippines follow an open telephone numbering plan and an open dial plan. Both plans are regulated by the National Telecommunications Commission, an attached agency under the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).
Village Telco is an initiative to build low-cost community telephone network hardware and software. It is based on a suite of open-source applications that enable entrepreneurs to set up and operate a telephone service in a specific area or supporting the needs of a specific community.
Phone hacking is the practice of exploring a mobile device, often using computer exploits to analyze everything from the lowest memory and CPU levels up to the highest file system and process levels. Modern open source tooling has become fairly sophisticated as to be able to "hook" into individual functions within any running app on an unlocked device and allow deep inspection and modification of its functions.
LinkNYC is an infrastructure project providing free Wi-Fi service in New York City. The office of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the plan on November 17, 2014, and the installation of the first kiosks, or "Links," started in late 2015. The Links replace the city's network of 9,000 to 13,000 payphones, a contract for which expired in October 2014. The LinkNYC kiosks were devised after the government of New York City held several competitions to replace the payphone system. The most recent competition, in 2014, resulted in the contract being awarded to the CityBridge consortium, which comprises Qualcomm; Titan and Control Group, which now make up Intersection; and Comark.
The KX series of telephone boxes in the United Kingdom was introduced by BT in 1985. Following the privatisation of BT in 1984, the company decided to create a newly designed and improved take on the British telephone box, which at this point consisted of only red telephone boxes which BT had recently acquired, the most common being the iconic K6 box. These red boxes were considered flawed in parts by BT for several reasons, including cost, lack of ventilation, accessibility and maintenance. BT announced the £160 million series of new boxes, the KX series designed by GKN, as well as announcing the eventual replacement of all existing telephone boxes. The main telephone box in the KX range is the KX100. Upon launch, there were five models in total. The boxes were produced at a rate of 5,000 a year, with the total count of all BT-owned kiosks reaching 137,000 by 1999, a number which has since decreased by more than seventy per cent.
Frequent Express (FX) is a high-capacity bus service with some bus rapid transit (BRT) features in Portland, Oregon, United States. Operated by TriMet as FX2–Division, the 15-mile (24 km) route runs east–west from 5th & Hoyt on the Portland Transit Mall in downtown Portland to Cleveland Avenue Park and Ride in Gresham via Division Street. It connects Portland City Center, Portland State University (PSU), South Waterfront, Southeast Portland, and central Gresham, with transfers to MAX Light Rail and the Portland Streetcar.
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