LinkNYC's 6 Million Users Have Used 8.6 Terabytes of Data

An anonymous reader shares a report: What better way to replace New York City's thousands of aging pay phones than with 9.5-foot-tall kiosks outfitted with 55-inch HD displays, gigabit internet, and Android tablets preloaded with informational apps? So went the thinking back in 2014, when then-mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a competition -- the Reinvent Payphones initiative -- calling on private enterprises, residents, and nonprofits to submit designs for spruced-up, publicly accessible hubs that would provide advertising-subsidized services to the public. CityBridge's LinkNYC beat out piezoelectric pressure plates, EV charging stations, and other competing proposals for a contract, and the consortium wasted no time in getting to work.

Intersection -- which with Qualcomm and CIVIQ Smartscapes manages the kiosks -- said it plans to spend $200 million laying down 400 miles of new communication cables and installing as many as 10,000 Links that supply free Wi-Fi to passersby within a 150-foot radius. The first kiosk went online in January, though the project has quite a ways to go -- 1,780 Links are active currently, short of the initial goal of 4,500 kiosks by July of this year. And the initial kiosks have really taken off. According to Intersection, the LinkNYC network now has more than 6 million unique users who have used 8.597 terabytes of data collectively -- equivalent to about 1.3 billion songs or 292 billion WhatsApp messages. And the project facilitates 600,000 phone calls every month, up from 500,000 in September of last year. Further reading: Free Municipal Wi-Fi May Be the Next Front In the War Against Privacy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.