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

Can you ping me now?

[corebreech]

(sorry, couldn't resist)

Pricing Plans

[Robspiere]

The article says they're "studying pricing plans." I wonder if they'll do a flat rate or what. I imagine they'd just put a DSL modem and a 802.11x box in each phone, and as we all know, once the cost of installing the base stations has been recovered, there's really almost no operating expense. They've got the DSLAMS in place around the city already and the could make support on the web only.

They're not likely to give it away, though. If they're smart they would tie it into their DSL service. They could provide one concurrent WiFi login per home DSL account. It could be your same login/password that you use for the crappy PPPoE service at home, and they could use the "captive firewall" as described above.

That might make me switch from Road Runner cable modem.

combine with VOIP?

[TracerJPN_USMC]

Why not combine this with a packaged VOIP service.. beats standing in line for a pay phone right? stay within 50 feet or so of the phone, break out your laptop and makes calls via VOIP. yes i know my sig is broken.