NYC’s New 5G LinkNYC Towers Don’t Actually Fix The Digital Divide. And They’re Ugly As Hell.
Back in 2014, New York City officials decided they would replace the city's dated pay phones with information kiosks" providing free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions. The kiosks were to be funded by context-aware" ads based on a variety of data collected from kiosk users and NYC residents just passing by.
It... didn't go well.
Within a few years, reports began to emerge that the company hired to deploy the kiosks (CityBridge) had only deployed 1900 of an originally promised 7,000 kiosks. And the kiosks they had deployed were being used to watch porn. The program has also been long criticized for over-collecting user data and being completely non-transparent about what data was being collected.
By 2020 CityBridge still owed the city $75 million. Last year, an audit by New York State's Comptroller found LinkNYC failed completely to meet its deployment goals, failed to adequately maintain existing kiosks, failed to turn on many already deployed kiosks, and had fallen well short of projected ad revenues.
What did the city do? It doubled down.
New York Mayor Eric Adams not only killed off a more promising plan to build a city open access fiber network to boost competition, he decided to expand the LinkNYC project. That's involved deploying entirely new, ugly, and even larger kiosks embedded with 5G small cells. City residents, so far, aren't particularly enthused about the eyesores:
Some residents are calling them eyesores. Others are worried about safety due to their placement. No one asked us about the design or where they should go. We have notes," said a Brooklyn neighborhood group on Facebook.
While the kiosks still provide free and useful services to those unafraid of sticky surfaces, they're a particular boon to wireless carriers looking to expand their 5G network reach using small cells, something they would have likely done anyway (usually using existing buildings and city light fixtures). Users can still access free Wi-Fi at the kiosks, but you'll obviously need a paid 5G subscription to actually access the 5G component of the towers.
The problem, again, is that the kiosks don't actually address the problem at the heart of the digital divide: duopoly/monopoly telecom power that has constrained city competition, resulting in high prices for home access. Two-in-five New York City households lack either a home broadband connection or cell service. More than 1.5 million New Yorkers lack both. Usually, high service costs are the biggest obstacle.
The kiosks are a nice perk, but they're not actually addressing the regional monopoly problem. And guys like Adams don't want to upset monopoly power because it means upsetting companies that aren't just politically powerful, but are bone-grafted to our intelligence gathering and first responder networks, effectively making them a part of government and beyond meaningful accountability.
It's the same story that plays out nationwide. There's just an unlimited number of half-measures professing to bridge the digital divide" that are, in reality, just band-aids. Band-aids that usually involve throwing additional subsidies at the very same monopolies responsible for driving meaningful competition out of your town, city, or state over the last thirty-five years.
Truly fixing the U.S. digital divide means policies that drive open access fiber networks and new, local competitors into the backyards of entrenched monopolies (see our recent report on this very subject).
New York City had a real opportunity to do this with the open access network component included in its original NYC Internet Master plan, but instead took the familiar path of half-cooked efforts that give politicians something to crow about, but don't actually solve (or usually even acknowledge!) the underlying problem of monopoly control.