I wouldn't call these event networks "part of the federated phone system". They are clients of companies that are part of it. External numbers into these networks are extensions of a public number they get from the upstream - just like any company having a PBX, they do not participate in any of the inter-provider infrastructure, do not own the phone numbers, ...

The internet equivalent to what they are doing would be getting a business line with a fixed, provider-owned IP prefix. The equivalent to what the parent describes would be getting a prefix delegation from a registry and peering with other networks.

It's still really cool for island systems though, which is the more important thing for those events.

> I wouldn't call these event networks "part of the federated phone system". They are clients of companies that are part of it. External numbers into these networks are extensions of a public number they get from the upstream - just like any company having a PBX, they do not participate in any of the inter-provider infrastructure, do not own the phone numbers, ...

I mean, they ran their own full MVNO, with their own SIM cards, with their own code on the cards, and operated their own tower.

That isn’t a simple number.

I meant purely from a "connection to the general phone system" perspective - at all events I've been they only had internal numbers and you could be called from the outside through an extension. If there was an event where that wasn't the case I stand corrected.

Having the entire (mostly/entirely? open-source) GSM network is really really cool and important, but from the perspective of the wider phone network still "only" a "fancy internal phone system", with the limitations of control that come with that.