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New York Experiments With Wi-Fi From Payphones
Payphones have been famously disappearing from public life; cell phones and other means of communication have made them ever less important in many contexts (and for most people).
Some places, it's hard to find not only payphones, but usable wireless signal as well. Still, there are a lot of payphones left in the wild (though the enclosed kind seem to be disappearing faster than on-premises ones), and now there's a plan in New York City to extend payphones' useful life by outfitting them as public Wi-Fi hotspots, beginning with a 10-phone trial already underway. It's not the first such project; we mentioned a similar multi-city wi-phone deployment in Canada 10 years ago. And in Austin, I've spotted at least one payphone fitted out as a solar-powered charging station for cellphones; probably not enough to get much charge, but at least it lets users place an emergency call with a flagging or dead battery. Covering Manhattan and the other boroughs with overlapping free Wi-Fi nodes, though, is a different beast entirely.
The Cloud wifi network has been operating from UK payphones for several years.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If you already have armored (payphones didn't mess around when it came to protecting their quarters or their wiring) hardpoints with access to the telco infrastructure and possibly power, what better place?
I hear in London, they are planning to do the same thing with Blue Police Boxes
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
In 100 years or so if the ocean levels keep rising you might get your wish!
First, payphones would not accept incoming calls because then drug dealers could deal drugs more efficiently. Then it didn't matter because everyone had a telephone in their pocket. Now the payphones are to become open access points? Won't that make it easier for drug dealers to deal drugs?
Their they're doing there hair.
Here in Barcelona, Spain, we have WIFI hotspots all around the city, they don't work really well but at least is free ( for the moment)
They're not just public out houses anymore!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Verizon tried this already in 2003. It was a pretty cool idea, because they already had the phone booth real estate, and the presence of telephones at each one meant that they could use their existing DSL infrastructure for backhaul.
Fast forward to 2012. Wifi is in far greater demand now than it was nine years ago, now that everyone's got tablets and other devices. Perhaps it is an idea whose time has come. However there will be stiff competition, particularly from cable companies in suburban areas where the wires are overhead. Many cable companies are now deploying thousands of devices that look like this on the wires. They're Wi-Fi hot spots with built in cable modems. Once the density gets high enough, subscribers are likely to find one in nearly every public place they find themselves in.
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I think I heard of these before. What are they? I thought they were extinct.
since this is Slashdot... and I'm not about to start doing it now... but the juxtaposition of "pay phone" and "wi-fi hotspot" made me think they were going to do a wi-fi hotspot with an out-dialing POTS modem spliced into the pay phone... you get internet at 33.6 kbps just like we did 15 years ago, and you drop quarters into the phone to keep your connection...
Yeah, I'm sure that's not what they're going to do. Even by the standards of NYC, what I imagined is pretty ghetto.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Who knows where Superman would have had to change otherwise.
NO, NO! They'll invade the rest of the state like burning rats fleeing a sinking ship!
One of the local Manhattan mini-storage companies had ads earlier this year "if you leave the city, you'll be stuck living in America."
I was shocked to see it, they're so rare these days. WiFi service in the subway would be cool.
On a related note, have you ever wondered what that Police Public Call Box thing is that The Doctor uses to travel through space and time? I used to wonder too. It wasn't until I went to Edinburgh that I saw them and other objects that looked like them. I remember jumping out of my seat and saying "There's a Tardis!"
Well apparently they had a phone accessible from the outside that the public could use to call the cops in an emergency. Cops would have access to the inside where they could go in and hang their hat, hold a prisoner while help came, and effectively use it as a mini police station. Some of them remain and have been re-purposed for other uses like coffee shops or news stands. There were a lot of designs and didn't seem to standardize like the classic red phone box did.
Cities like Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool have updated the concept with "help points", little computerized kiosks that are under CCTV surveillance and have a direct line to the police. It'd be cool if they could introduce the modern functionality but contain it in the form of the old 1929 Mackenzie Trench design that was popularized by Doctor Who.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
In Hong Kong the PCCW hot spots were everywhere. If my hotel hadn't offered free wifi I would have been strongly tempted to try it out. At about ~$23US/mo for access it seems competitive with basic service in the US. Offers everything from a few minutes to "unlimited" monthly access.
http://www.pccwwifi.com/eng/
I was in Hong Kong this spring, most pay phones already have WiFi, along with many buses, most subway stations, trains, coffee shops and more. Instead of buying a mobile phone while I was there, I just turned off my cell signal and used Skype on my Android. $7/mo/device (USD) for unlimited WiFi in the city with PCCW. http://www.hongkongextras.com/internet_access.html http://wireless.netvigator.com/eng/index.htm
I thought it was unlawful for government to enter into direct competition with a private business?
I work for a WISP and we successfully had a local government free access point network shut down because they were competing with us illegally.
(I don't work for them, nor am i their customer)
They have set up all the payphones and highly frequented places with wifi. Their mobile subscriptions offer a transparent authentication process for these hotspots. So if you have a mobile phone from then then it will automatically join these hotspots if you are close.
Good idea to provide more hot spots, to provide alternatives to phone towers, that sort of thing. But why free? You don't want to have a pay phone type money slot, too vulnerable to robberies (a major problem with the traditional pay phone that always showed signs of pilfering damage). But how about, the first transaction your phone or tablet or laptop makes after making a wifi connection with that "public hot spot" is a debit, a charge? The electronic equivalent to "Deposit 25 cents please" ? You don't make the transaction, permit the mini-billing? You don't get your connection. Bidda bing ...
And the user pays for his instant gratification and convenience instead of us taxpayers, thanka verra much.