Freakin’ Cheap: Free Telecom

The typical household pays north of $20,000 over ten years in landline, long distance, and mobile phone fees.

In our household, we pay almost nothing for these services.

There is a long history behind free telephone service. In the 1960’s and 70’s, phreaking was the art of hacking the public phone system using tone generators called blue boxes.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak went door to door peddling their version of the blue box. Their customers used the boxes to circumvent the phone company billing system.

Phreaking worked with the analog trunk lines of 40 years ago. It does not work today.

Today, there are legal ways to get free phone services: free landline service, free unlimited domestic long distance, and free mobile phone voice data and text services. Even free home Internet.

In future posts I’ll document how I did it.

Note: The setup in the photo at the top of this post is fake. As a kid, I listened to stations from all over Europe on this vacuum tube radio.

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