NYC is about to upgrade the telephone booth by transforming the infrastructure into WIFI hotspots. This is actually a pretty big deal, which will entail a lot of construction, laying of fiber optic cable, LED displays, and advertising–lots of it.
The city plans on blanketing all five boroughs with 4,550 pillars over the next four years, and a total of 7,500 phone-booths-of-the-future by 2024. The kiosks are intended to replace the existing, now-outdated phone booth infrastructure. The project involves lining the the city with hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable. When fully operational, in addition to Internet, the stalls will offer free phone calls, USB charging, and a tablet for web browsing. Those who want to hop on the WiFi from their smartphones have access to an encrypted network, which will keep personal information secure from everyone else accessing the public WiFi.
By providing NYC residents with free WIFI, effectively pushing against the carriers, the city is likely to recover much of the ad revenue it lost from the phone booths. Remember all of those ads?
O’Donnell estimates that dozens of kiosks will start lining the city’s streets over the next month, with 510 to be deployed by mid-summer. The Links will be set up along 3rd Avenue in Manhattan up to the South Bronx, on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, in Jamaica, Queens and St. George, Staten Island. The project has already seen delays. The first kiosks were supposed to go up last fall.
Bright 55-inch digital advertising displays that flank the sides of the kiosks will subsidize ad-free Internet browsing, with the stands promising to bring in $500 million in revenue for the city in the first 12 years of the contract. Pay phones brought in $50 million in revenue from ads each year. Link kiosks, however, can offer more targeted, data-driven ads, said O’Donnell. “We can use local data, demographic data, [and] real-time information to display the right message to the right audience,” he said.
I haven’t done any research on this yet, figure out which small companies stand to benefit from this. If successful, I am certain many cities will copy NYC, potentionally leading to a mini-Renaissance in telecom plays.
This is definitely something to monitor in 2016.
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How do panels stand up in colder climates?
I believe a company in Ireland called Eircom has done this and been quite profitable. Had a friend send me pictures of their public WIFI spots.
LA is in the process of approving a plan for free wifi as well.
And I thought it was smell-o-vision.
Sell mothers T?
Never!
Real motive is to facilitate enhanced NYPD surveillance.
I can’t see it changing much of anything actually, besides a bit of downward pressure on cell companies data plans. There is already so much free wifi around that this isn’t really a game changer.
Infrastructure companies like VCM-T or SW-T might benefit. Hopefully as I own some of each.