Out with the old, in with the new.
New York City has been thinking of ways to dispose of its thousands of outmoded payphone booths that line the sidewalks of its five boroughs. Now, it has come up with an innovative way to do just that.
The city announced LinkNYC, a project that aims to get rid of the old, useless payphones and replace them with 10,000 Wi-Fi towers that the city claims will be able to deliver Wi-Fi at gigabit speeds within a 150-foot radius of every tower.
Construction of the first 500 towers, called Links, will begin in early 2015. Most of them will be fully operational by the end of next year, and construction is expected to continue for the next six years to provide Big Apple residents with Wi-Fi that is 20 times faster than most Internet speeds in private homes and 100 times faster than the average municipal Wi-Fi network.
"This is going to be a critical step towards more success," says Maya Wiley, counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Wiley adds that the 9.5-foot tall Links will be essential for lower-income families who have limited access to Internet and city services. Aside from being able to connect online, the Links will be able to retain the payphone's old functionality by allowing users to make phone calls to anywhere in the United States. The difference, however, is phone calls made through the Links are free.
The sleek, slim Wi-Fi towers will also house built-in Android tablets installed with apps that allow everyone to access city services and directions. They will also have charging ports to allow users to charge their mobile devices on the go.
LinkNYC is a joint project of the New York City government and CityBridge, a consortium of technology companies that made the winning bid for the project. Wiley says the project will not cost the public a dime. Instead, CityBridge hopes to financially sustain its ambitious plans by displaying digital advertisements on both sides of each Wi-Fi tower placed in commercial areas, although Links to be built in residential places will thankfully be void of any ads.
CityBridge will share 50 percent of all ad revenue with the city and will be required to start making payments of $20 million once the first 500 towers go into operation in 2015. The city expects to make at least $500 million in revenue from selling advertising space on its Wi-Fi towers in the first 12 years of LinkNYC. In contrast, the old payphone network was still able to generate $16.5 million for the city.
"This will be completely unlimited access," says Colin O'Donnell, chief operating officer of Control Group, a CityBridge member company that will take care of the towers' design. "We're going through all this effort to bring massive bandwidth to the streets and we really want to see people use it. So, we're going to bring that connectivity and get out of the way."
CityBridge also comprises outdoor advertiser Titan, which currently handles the city's payphone advertising network, Comark, which will take care of the actual tower construction, and Qualcomm, which will provide the connectivity itself.
It is not clear, however, how Qualcomm plans to deploy Wi-Fi at gigabit-level speeds. Current technologies do not yet provide support for such high-speed Wi-Fi, and CityBridge has not announced any partnerships with Internet service providers to provide such a service. If Qualcomm plans to use a new Wi-Fi standard, it will likely take time before consumers have compatible mobile devices. After all, many smartphones have yet to be equipped with the newest 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard.
Still, LinkNYC has been a long time coming, with then Mayor Michael Bloomberg overseeing small-scale pilot tests of payphones-turned-Wi-Fi-towers as early as two years ago.
In March this year, the city announced a request for proposals for reinventing the city's decrepit payphones, with the minimum requirement being that any structures to be built over the phone booths should be able to provide Wi-Fi access and free calls to 911 and the city's general information hotline.
As for the payphones, both CityBridge and the city agreed that they will leave a handful of the old phone booths intact as historic artifacts and a nostalgic reminder of the conveniences they used to provide.
