The world’s fastest and largest
municipal WiFi network is being rolled out in New York.
LinkNYC will provide free-to-use connections with speeds of up to
one gigabit per second through a network of 7,500 wireless hotspots that will
be located on the sites of old telephone boxes. The speeds on offer will be
roughly 20 times faster than the typical broadband service in New York.
The first of two “Link kiosks” will
be unveiled on Tuesday on Third Avenue: the nine-foot towers will act as WiFi
transmitters for a new superfast fiber network to replace the copper wires that
once connected the phone boxes.
Each kiosk will also include a
hands-free phone, an Android tablet for web browsing, and two digital screens
for displaying advertisements, which will be sold to fund the service.
Customers will start testing the
service later this month, and LinkNYC plans to install 500 kiosks by July, at
which point the network will be available in all five boroughs of New
York.
The consortium of investors behind
LinkNYC won the bid to build the service when the city’s phone box franchise
was put out to tender to municipal WiFi companies in 2014.
In June last year, the two leading
members of the LinkNYC consortium were acquired by Sidewalk Labs, an
“urban innovation” company set up by Google, and Dan Doctoroff, the former chief
executive of Bloomberg.
Stanley Shor, a city official, said
the project was part of mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to close the “digital
divide” in New York, where about one in four families does not have a broadband
connection.
“This will replace the city’s old phone boxes
with new structures that offer totally free WiFi, bridging the ‘digital
divide’,” Mr Shor said at a briefing on Monday. “People who don’t have internet
in their homes will be able to have it all throughout the city.”
LinkNYC investors plan to spend
roughly $200m building the network, which they hope to finish within eight
years. The consortium has promised to pay New York City $500m or half of its
total revenues, whichever is greater, by the end of the 12-year contract.
The plan is to generate that revenue
by selling advertisements, which will be displayed on 55-inch digital screens,
two of which are mounted on either side of the kiosks.
“We’re going to use real-time
demographic information to inform the adverts, but we will never sell or share
personally identifiable data,” said Colin O’Donnell of the LinkNYC
consortium.
The project has the potential to
steal business from wireless operators as customers may decide to use the free
network rather than paying their mobile phone carrier for data.
The service is intended for
customers who want high-speed internet access through their mobile devices
while travelling on New York’s streets. However, some people who live
close to a kiosk could access the network from inside their apartments,
allowing them to dispense with a paid-for internet connection entirely.
