For several years now we’ve been hearing stories about New York City’s public payphone kiosks being turned into Wi-Fi hotspots, and it finally looks like something’s going to happen. LinkNYC – a group that includes tech, telecom, and ad firms, as well as the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation – plans to begin work next year converting the city’s thousands of payphone kiosks into Link ‘connection points’.
There are few pieces of infrastructure in any city more iconic than the pay phone. Clark Kent used it. So did Colin Farrell. And Bill. And Ted. The pay phone has been a time-travel machine, and a safe haven, and a comedic device. It has not, however, for a very long time — for most of us — been used to make phone calls. For that reason, cities have been trying to figure out what to do with these outdated assets, and how to re-imagine them as telecom infrastructure for a modern era when most of us have our own cellphones. Now New York has unveiled the most ambitious plan yet for the pay phone of the future, which will, among things, require no pay to make domestic phones calls, and function as much more than a phone.