City Greenlights Plan To Turn Pay Phones Into WiFi Hotspots, Including 586 Brooklyn Locations

The city has approved a plan to replace a total of 7,600 outdated pay phone booths with sleek public WiFi kiosks in all five boroughs, including 586 in Brooklyn that will be completed by 2019.

The city’s Franchise and Concession Review Committee signed an updated version of their contract with LinkNYC Wednesday – which initially proposed a two-tier system for rich and poor neighborhoods – following a push from City Comptroller Scott Stringer to provide more equitable distribution of high-speed WiFi access throughout the city. (It was not the first time the city faced criticism for inequitable distribution of public WiFi locations.)

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports:

The LinkNYC system is funded by advertising revenue. As originally proposed, ad-supported kiosks in wealthy neighborhoods, mostly in Manhattan, would average super-fast Internet speeds of 1 gigabit — ten times faster than kiosks in most locations in the outer boroughs.

This disparity fed into concerns Stringer has expressed about unequal access to the Internet across New York City, as described in a Dec. 7 report.

The new contract increases the number of ad-supported hotspots throughout the city, and also requires more transparency and communication with communities about the locations of kiosks and performance issues.

Stringer expressed approval for the new plan yesterday.

“LinkNYC’s proposal to put high speed WiFi kiosks throughout the City will not by itself eliminate the digital divide, but marks an important step toward bridging that gap,” he said in a statement. “Just as the subways powered New York’s growth in the 20th century, high-speed broadband will drive our City’s economic competitiveness in the 21st century — and we need to make sure all our neighborhoods have the tools to meet that future.”

Here’s a map of the projected WiFi coverage, via I Quant NY: