Verizon To Offer WiFi At Pay Phones

Makarand writes "Verizon has ambitious plans to catapult pay phones from the pre-cellular era to the WiFi era by creating hotspots around pay phones using an extension of their DSL service. The current plan is to upgrade 200,000 pay phones in the New York metro area to provide a WiFi service. Although major metros are spotted with hotspots, finding them is usually a big problem. Verizon thinks that specially marked WiFi enabled pay phones would solve the problem of locating the hotspots." Sounds similar to Bell Canada's move to do the same.

Comments

This is a pleasant surprise.

[GreatDave]

I'd love to see payphones miniaturized and extended into both wireless broadband hotspots and VoIP phone points. This could lead to more bang for the buck for Verizon.

Re:A last gasp

[zutroy]

I don't think that Verizon actually needs to do this. They don't really have an interest in keeping the payphones viable; they're phasing them out anyway. This is just an interesting new way to use existing infrastructure that would have otherwise been sent to the scrap heap.

havoc?

[lpret]

Why would this be any different than any dsl connection? Because it's wifi?

The most anyone could do is get past the authentication, so Verizon loses a little money, it's not a big deal. That certainly isn't havoc in my book.

Now what would be interesting is to have that wifi dsl and then also do an ad-hoc network and allow several people to get on through their own little gateway. Brings down the cost quite a bit I'd think...