New York City trading in payphones for Wi-Fi hotspots

Discarded public payphones are piled in a city salvation yard under the West Side Highway at 135th and 12th Avenue on June 18, 2013 in New York City. photo: Getty Images

It’s not as if anybody needs a press release to know that payphones are out of style these days, but the fact New York City is set to replace 500 phone booths with high-speed Wi-Fi hotspots by July means the writing is on the wall, or in this case the booth.

These Wi-Fi hotspots will sit on top of the phone boxes that stands over 9 feet tall and allow passersby to make free phone calls and surf the web via an Android tablet. The whole setup will be built between two big electronic screens that display billboard style advertising, a smart way to pay for the free service.

The project itself is called LinkNYC and its being launched thanks to a partnership between Qualcomm Inc., CIVIQ Smartscapes and Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. The partnership is collectively known as CityBridge and together, the three tech firms will invest $200 million in the project with the aim being to eventually replace 7,500 phone booths across New York City.

What’s really mind blowing about the whole initiative is the connection speed of these hotspots. CityBridge is going to allow users to download at the speed of 1,000 Megabits per second (Mbps). Given that it takes a speed of approximately 8 Mbps to download a single megabyte of data, it means users will be able to download more than a gigabyte of data in less than 10 minutes. The best part is that because the towers that hold up the Android tablet and Wi-Fi equipment will display ads that pay for the whole thing, users won’t see ads on their smart phones or tablets when connecting to the service.

A woman uses a mobile device while walking past a Bell payphone in Ottawa. photo: Reuters

It’s crazy to think that less than a decade ago, Bell Canada increased payphone rates from 25 cents to 50 cents to recoup the money lost to people adopting cellphones. Bell actually tried to raise the price again to $1 as recently as four years ago, but the CRTC squashed that.

Fast-forward to the present day and its clear smartphones and Wi-Fi hotspots will eventually be the final dagger in the old school payphone’s coffin. It’s got to be just a matter of time before Canada’s telecom giants follow suit with a similar business model in order to continue to stay profitable and relevant, especially since the need to communicate in public as quickly and conveniently as possible no matter where you are will never go away.

As recently as last July, Toronto city council was discussing the implementation of free city-wide Wi-Fi, and free public Wi-Fi is available in many locations throughout Calgary, too.

While the payphone seems to be going the way of the dodo, don’t count it out yet here in Canada: in 2015, 32 per cent of Canadians say they used a pay phone at some point in the previous year.

The number of payphones in Canada does continue to dwindle, expected to reach 55,000 this year (about one-third the number that were in place a decade ago). But for the time being, it seems Canadians aren’t done with their payphones just yet.