By this time next year, if all goes according to plan, there will be a new fixture on streets of New York: hundreds of slim aluminum pillars, each providing some of the fastest free internet available anywhere in the world.
The kiosks are part of the ambitious initiative LinkNYC, which earlier this week was chosen to replace the city's aging and all but forgotten pay phones. Beyond blanketing Gotham in crazy-fast Wi-Fi, the pylons are designed to let people charge their gadgets and look up directions on touch screens. Eventually, they could broadcast emergency messages or provide a place where New Yorkers can provide civic feedback on various topics.
Just as novel is the plan for how city dwellers pay for it. They won't have to dig into their pockets for spare change or put up with still more taxes. Instead, they must endure advertisements. It's the same deal we tacitly accept when we use great free apps like Gmail, but IRL: a first-rate service in exchange for having people trying to sell us stuff in ever more precise, ever more determined ways.
LinkNYC is the work of Mayor's Office of Technology and Innovation and CityBridge, a consortium that includes Qualcomm, Titan, Comark and Control Group. It's a bold vision but not yet a sure-thing. The plan awaits approval by a handful of city boards, and many logistical questions remain unanswered. If the plan ultimately is approved, however, there could be as many as 400 of these high-tech monoliths---or "Links"---in the Big Apple by the end of next year. The goal is to erect some 10,000 throughout the five boroughs.
The New York firm Control Group was responsible for the UX design of the pillars (it's also doing the touchscreen slabs being deployed in NYC subway stations). Partner Colin O'Donnell says one unique thing about the pillars is how they tie together interactions across three types of screens: one public, one private, and one somewhere in between. That is, the screen beaming ads from the pillar, the screen on your phone or laptop, and the touchscreen you use on the pillar itself.
That last screen is what links the new structures to phone booths of yore, making them touch points for one-to-one interaction. Passersby will use an Android tablet built into each Link to consult interactive maps, for example, or report broken stop lights. A tactile keypad will let people place free phone calls to anyone in the U.S.
Relying on Android will make it easy to refine apps on the fly and add new ones, O'Donnell says. He sees polling as one possible future use case. "Think about how labor intensive it is to go to a town hall meeting," he says. He imagines a scenario where you could walk by a Link and answer a few questions about an issue in your neighborhood. Maybe not the ideal model for the future of civic engagement, but potentially a practical one.
Just as phone booths were shared telephones, O'Donnell sees these touchscreens as a shared computer. But the Link's other two screens are what make it an entirely new infrastructural beast. First are the large displays placed on the sides of those Links installed in commercial districts to project advertisements. (Those in residential neighborhoods will be slimmer, with no screens.) This updates an old idea---telephone booths often were wrapped in ads, and many cities have billboards and ad kiosks. What's new is that these ads will pay for internet on your phone.
So, about that Wi-Fi. If the plan goes through, LinkNYC's gigabit connection would be among the fastest public internet available anywhere. Though today's phones can't yet take full advantage of such bandwidth, CityBridge claims each pillar will be able to support 250 people within a radius if 150 feet without dipping in speed. Specific logistical details are vague, but the idea is once you've signed up, your devices will automatically join the network and stay connected as you move throughout the city.
This, O'Donnell says, is the real mission of LinkNYC: bringing connectivity to all of New York. "And not only accessible connectivity. I'd say disruptive connectivity," he adds. He insists LinkNYC is commitment to building a first-rate network, not the sort of last-resort free internet you'd expect from an airport, for example.
Though it remains to be seen if LinkNYC can deliver on that promise, the city is keen on the prospect. The mayor's office says the plan could help "close the digital divide," freeing lower-income people who primarily use phones for internet access from relying on pricey data plans. It's a step toward looking at the internet as a service that a city can provide its citizens. As infrastructure, it could give rise to new types of apps and city services that don't make sense with today's connectivity.
So what's the catch? Ads. Specifically, those on the sides of the kiosks. Those advertisements are a hugely valuable asset, O'Donnell says. "The real reason why it's going to work in New York City where it hasn't elsewhere is because New York is the biggest, most valuable media market in the world."
Beyond the valuable real estate they occupy, the Link ads will be unprecedentedly sophisticated. The plan, as ever, is to use technology to make them more relevant, more engaging, more contextually-driven. A particular kiosk could change the ad it's displaying based on what time of day it is, for example, or what events are happening nearby, or even potentially what sorts of people are walking by it, at least in a broad demographic sense.
Such a system could provide new avenues for local businesses. O'Donnell sees a future where Joe's NY Pizza could buy space on the five kiosks in the surrounding neighborhoods, and even program them to deploy when business is slow. The average New Yorker might even get in on the action; one day, you might be able to pay, say, $20 to propose to your spouse on the internet tower outside his or her office. Welcome to the weird world of hyperlocal advertising.
O'Donnell says using lucrative ads to pay for ambitious public services is a new, potentially radical, idea. "I don't think it's ever been done before," he says. At least, not in the real world. On the internet, we're quite familiar with this arrangement. It's how we get our free social networks, our free video sharing sites, and our free inboxes.
Some will undoubtedly see this as a Faustian bargain. We've sacrificed our personal data for great software, but letting that model seep into our cities somehow seems more pernicious. There was a flare-up recently when it was discovered that Titan, an ad company and LinkNYC partner, was installing Bluetooth radios in existing phone booths in New York City. The tracking involved in this next-generation system could potentially be far more invasive.
And yet, from another perspective, LinkNYC could just be a smart approach to delivering a potentially transformative city service. Infrastructure is hard. Taxes are unpopular. And New York's been aglow with ads for decades anyway, so what's the difference? If the plan does go through, and the network is as robust as LinkNYC promises, there's a good chance many people will see it just like they see Gmail: as a really good, free thing.
