Wi-Fi Kiosks for All? How Might LinkNYC Bridge a Digital Divide?
It’s New York City at 2am on a late October night and you realize you’ve lost your phone. What do you do?
Gino Milano, 35, left his phone at a friend’s house and made a call on LinkNYC to let someone know he would meet them shortly. These futuristic metal boxes lining New York City avenues provide free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services and maps.
The Links have been replacing payphones since a 2014 franchise agreement between New York City and CityBridge, the LinkNYC vendor. “I’m in the harm reduction field. I know people that are in the streets use them a lot. Users, IV drug users, use them a lot,” said Milano. “They are great for emergencies.”
Links, which are meant to be convenient, have faced controversies throughout their existence with slow deployment and placement in areas that don’t need them most. Now, LinkNYC has shifted to focus on equity, but data and the stories behind some people’s experiences might hint at how the city’s attempts to bridge a digital divide are playing out:
“The best thing they did was put a charger everywhere,” said Michael G, 28. He stood leaning against a Link, charging his phone, and watching people walk by with their coffees from a nearby West Village bakery.
He moved to New York City from Boston only a few weeks ago. “It’s literally a tablet. Like an Android. The maps kind of suck. It doesn’t know its own location, so you have to type it in and then find where you want to go.”
Michael G said he thinks they’re mostly for people who are homeless. “But they don’t really use them, they just kind of fuck them up.”
He notices more in Midtown than anywhere else. “I think honestly it’s because it’s where most of the wealthy white people are. You don’t find one in Queens. I think there might be like three in Queens.” While there are more than three Links in Queens, Michael G is right about there being more Links in Manhattan. Manhattan has more than four times as many Links than any other borough.
With this, when looking at the placement of the Links, there is a larger concentration in places with higher household incomes. This is shown below:
The Link locations are not random. CityBridge depends on advertising revenue, so past Link locations have largely been selected with revenue in mind. In the past year, CityBridge has begun to shift more towards equity-based access. But with free public Wi-Fi comes privacy concerns:
“I tried to download the installation for LinkNYC private, which is a tool that you can use for an encrypted network and it didn’t work at all,” said Quinn Manning, 20, a student at Columbia University who didn’t have any Wi-Fi access besides LinkNYC after one of the tenants’ fridge blocked the router. He said it’s the same for any public Wi-Fi network though, like a Starbucks or a public library. “I’m open to hacks and attacks.”
While Manning was able to get Wi-Fi with the LinkNYC near him, the 9-foot-tall towers are equipped with slower 4G Wi-Fi. CityBridge’s current plan is to construct 32-foot-tall Link 5G towers, bringing a new source of revenue from telecom companies wanting Links to hold their 5G equipment.
These new Links are being constructed in other boroughs due to an equitable deployment mandate resulting from a July 2021 State Comptroller’s Audit. According to a presentation by the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation, CityBridge, and ZenFi Networks, 40% of New York City Households lack the combination of home and mobile broadband connection. The presentation also reported that 30% of Link users had no other access to broadband internet, with more than 10 million users since 2014. The 2021 Amendment plans for 90% of new installations to be built in outer boroughs and above 96th Street in Manhattan.
This process is ongoing, with one new Link activated last week. But how will these stations be maintained? The kiosks have been vandalized in the past and there are some local concerns over the size and appeal of the new 5G towers. Will these novel stations eventually get old? For now, many New Yorkers are still discovering the stations, surprised by the free services available:
“I thought it was gonna sound like when you purchase headphones that are really bad quality from the dollar store,” said a family member, Irma Prishker, 31.
We stood across the street from each other testing calls from a LinkNYC station.
“I think the sound was better than I expected because we are in a very busy street and there was a lot of noise around you when you were speaking,” said Prishker. “I didn’t even know that you could use it for phone calls without having to pay or anything.”
