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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.
And if you ask nicely The Doctor will upgrade your connection so that you can use it from anytime and anywhere.
On top of streetlights perhaps? Hard to get up there without getting caught and will increase range being higher off the ground..
Lights already have power, and many have some sort of network connection for monitoring...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is the part I am having a hard time grasping. We are replacing "Pay Phones" with "Free Wi-Fi"
Now back in the days Pay Phones were popular as you put a quarter in and you can talk, people didn't have Cell Phones, however they had Home Phones which were cheaper then using Pay Phones... Pay Phones were good money, and people used them not to save money, but because they were convenient. Cell Phones are more convenient so they replaced Pay Phones. Now we are getting Free Wi-Fi? What is going to stop people and business from using the public Wi-Fi vs getting their own? Do you really want everyone in 100 meters to be using the same Wi-Fi? Where nearby homes and offices will be using it all the time too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Vancouver actually had a proposal to do exactly this, as well as to include cell tower coverage and potentially a few other types of data.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/05/22/douglas-coupland-created-v-pole-may-take-high-tech-to-the-streets-in-vancouver/
"The device, no larger than a telephone pole, would manage cell signals for multiple carriers, as well as wireless Internet for the surrounding neighbourhood. In-ground pads plugged into the pole would provide inductive charging for parked electric cars. An integrated touch screen would display maps, ads or payment interfaces, and an LED street light would be perched at the top of the pole."
I was thinking something similar. Why not have it coin activated. Put in a quarter (or several), pick up the receiver, and listen for the x-digit key to access the point. Have it reset every 5 or 15 minutes or something.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
dude, this is 2012
the drugs of choice are prescribed by a doctor and paid for by insurance. oxycotin, vicodin and others are just cleaned up heroin.
... and when you get hooked and subsequently busted for abusing them, you can say, "it's not a drug addiction, it's a medical condition!"
Thanks, Rush!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I imagine it'd work more like airport Wi-Fi, where anyone can connect, but to get through the walled garden you have to pay for an hour, day or sub-up for a month.
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