New York City signals plan to replace pay phones with Wi-Fi

NEW YORK — Operator, won't you help me replace this call?

A 9-foot-tall, narrow structure installed this past week on a Manhattan sidewalk is signaling a plan to turn pay phones into what's billed as the world's biggest and fastest municipal Wi-Fi network.

The first of at least 7,500 planned hot spots are due to go online early next year, promising superfast and free Wi-Fi service, new street phones with free calling, ports to charge personal phones and a no-cost windfall for the city.

With some cities nationwide making renewed pushes for public Wi-Fi after an earlier wave of enthusiasm faded, New York officials say their project is democratizing data access while modernizing outmoded street phones.

For now, the first hot spot is still being tested and sits under a gray cover. But some passers-by like the sound of what's in store.

"It's always helpful" to have Wi-Fi to reduce the bite that apps and Web-surfing take out of cellular data service, which is capped in many consumers' plans, Jack Thomas said this week while texting near the dormant kiosk.

But others have qualms about New Yorkers linking their devices to a public network as they stroll down the street, though the city has said data will be encrypted and any information harvested for advertising will be anonymized.

"I think it makes us all more vulnerable to wrongdoers," Bee Mosca said as she eyed the future hot spot.

Pay phones may seem like telecom relics when 68 percent of Americans own smartphones, according to the Pew Research Center on Internet, Science & Technology. But about 8,200 pay phones still dot New York streets.

A consortium of companies, including wireless-technology player Qualcomm, is to pay the estimated $200 million installation cost and take half the revenue from the kiosks' digital advertising, projected at $1 billion over 12 years. The city gets the other half, more than doubling the $17 million a year it gets from pay phones now.

Each hot spot covers about a 150-foot radius with what's pledged as one-gigabit-per-second service, about 20 times the speed of average home Internet service.

Though many Americans now carry Internet connectivity in their pockets, the network "can be a win for users who can save on their data plans, and it can be a win for (cellular) networks if they're really overtaxed," said Erik Stallman, general counsel of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a group that advocates for Internet liberties and access.

Source: New York City signals plan to replace pay phones with Wi-Fi