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. All of the 9.5-foot-tall (2.9 m) Links feature two 55-inch (140 cm) high-definition displays on their sides; Android tablet computers for accessing city maps, directions, and services, and making video calls; two free USB charging stations for smartphones; and a phone allowing free calls to all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The Links also provide the ability to use calling cards to make international calls, and each Link has one button to call 9-1-1 directly. CityBridge has also installed 32-foot-tall (9.8 m) poles under the Link5G brand, which provide both Wi-Fi and 5G service. The project brings free, encrypted, gigabit wireless internet coverage to the five boroughs by converting old payphones into Wi-Fi hotspots where free phone calls could also be made. As of 2020, there are 1,869 Links citywide; eventually, 7,500 Links are planned to be installed in the New York metropolitan area, making the system the world's fastest and most expansive. Intersection has also installed InLinks in cities across the UK. The Links are seen as a model for future city builds as part of smart city data pools and infrastructure. Since the Links' deployment, there have been several concerns about the kiosks' features. Privacy advocates have stated that the data of LinkNYC users can be collected and used to track users' movements throughout the city. There are also concerns with cybercriminals possibly hijacking the Links, or renaming their personal wireless networks to the same name as LinkNYC's network, in order to steal LinkNYC users' data. Until 2016, the tablets of the Links could be used to browse the Internet, but they were disabled due to concerns arose about the Link tablets' browsers being used for illicit purposes. The Link5G poles were installed starting in 2022.
History
Payphones and plans for reuse
In 1999, 13 companies signed a contract that legally obligated them to maintain New York City's payphones for 15 years. In 2000, the city's tens of thousands of payphones were among the 2.2 million payphones spread across the United States. Since then, these payphones' use had been declining with the advent of cellphones. As of July 2012, there were 13,000 phones in over 10,000 individual locations; that number had dropped to 9,133 phones in 7,302 locations by April 2014, at a time when the number of payphones in the United States had declined more than 75 percent, to 500,000. The contract with the 13 payphone operators was set to expire in October 2014, after which time the payphones' futures were unknown. In July 2012, the New York City government released a public request for information, asking for comments about the future uses for these payphones. The RFI presented questions such as "What alternative communications amenities would fill a need?"; "If retained, should the current designs of sidewalk payphone enclosures be substantially revised?"; and "Should the current number of payphones on City sidewalks change, and if so, how?". Through the RFI, the New York City government sought new uses for the payphones, including a combination of "public wireless hotspots, touch-screen wayfinding panels, information kiosks, charging stations for mobile communications devices, [and] electronic community bulletin boards," all of which eventually became the features of the kiosks that were included in the LinkNYC proposal. In 2013, a year before the payphone contract was set to expire, there was a competition that sought ideas to further repurpose the network of payphones. The competition, held by the administration of Michael Bloomberg, expanded the idea of the pilot project. There were 125 responses that suggested a Wi-Fi network, but none of these responses elaborated on how that would be accomplished.
Previous free Wi-Fi projects In 2012, the government of New York City installed Wi-Fi routers at 10 payphones in the city (seven in Manhattan, two in Brooklyn, and one in Queens) as part of a pilot project. The Wi-Fi was free of charge and available for use at all times. The Wi-Fi signal was detectable from a radius of a few hundred feet (about 100m). Two of New York City's largest advertising companies—Van Wagner and Titan, who collectively owned more than 9,000 of New York City's 12,000 payphones at the time—paid $2,000 per router, with no monetary input from either the city or taxpayers. While the payphones participating in the Wi-Fi pilot project were poorly marked, the Wi-Fi offered at these payphones was significantly faster than some of the other free public Wi-Fi networks offered elsewhere. The Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem received free Wi-Fi starting in late 2013. Routers were installed in three phases within a 95-block area between 110th Street, Frederick Douglass Boulevard, 138th Street, and Madison Avenue. Phase 1, from 110th to 120th Streets, finished in 2013; Phase 2, from 121st to 126th Street, was expected to be complete in February 2014; and Phase 3, the remaining area, was supposed to be finished by May 2014. The network was estimated to serve 80,000 Harlemites, including 13,000 in public housing projects who may have otherwise not had broadband internet access at home. At the time, it was dubbed the United States' most expansive "continuous free public Wi-Fi network."
Bids
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