LinkNYC's 6 Million Users Have Used 8.6 Terabytes of Data

An anonymous reader shares a report: What better way to replace New York City's thousands of aging pay phones than with 9.5-foot-tall kiosks outfitted with 55-inch HD displays, gigabit internet, and Android tablets preloaded with informational apps? So went the thinking back in 2014, when then-mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a competition -- the Reinvent Payphones initiative -- calling on private enterprises, residents, and nonprofits to submit designs for spruced-up, publicly accessible hubs that would provide advertising-subsidized services to the public. CityBridge's LinkNYC beat out piezoelectric pressure plates, EV charging stations, and other competing proposals for a contract, and the consortium wasted no time in getting to work.

Intersection -- which with Qualcomm and CIVIQ Smartscapes manages the kiosks -- said it plans to spend $200 million laying down 400 miles of new communication cables and installing as many as 10,000 Links that supply free Wi-Fi to passersby within a 150-foot radius. The first kiosk went online in January, though the project has quite a ways to go -- 1,780 Links are active currently, short of the initial goal of 4,500 kiosks by July of this year. [...] And the initial kiosks have really taken off. According to Intersection, the LinkNYC network now has more than 6 million unique users who have used 8.597 terabytes of data collectively -- equivalent to about 1.3 billion songs or 292 billion WhatsApp messages. And the project facilitates 600,000 phone calls every month, up from 500,000 in September of last year. Further reading: Free Municipal Wi-Fi May Be the Next Front In the War Against Privacy.

Pee fi

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

"It smells like pee!"

"Dude, you're 100 feet away!"

"Not helping its case any!"

Re: That's 1.43 Megabytes Each

[tysonedwards]

The odd detail is that since September, they only used 233GB / month. That's barely enough for said 6 million people to send a ping.

Re:

[rtb61]

Perhaps they were looking just at data downloaded, now they have snuck in data uploaded and not said much about the nature of the data. The design kind of makes no sense, why have it free standing when you can have it flat against a building on sticking a inches out and in many location under cover. Stop and think but you do not get as good a view up and down the street, with built in microphones, so free standing closer to the street, which makes them and their users much more vulnerable to traffic but aff

Do people abuse it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering if it limits client use somehow? I can imagine people living in the immediate area might try to smooch off of the kiosk WiFi for their home computer, instead of paying for their own internet connection.

Re:

[stealth_finger]

Buy every one a pizza instead.

Re:

[stealth_finger]

Read the report you fucking jews.

So cross 1 thing off the list of 100 reasons hes a shit bag.

Numbers donâ(TM)t add up

[sinan]

8.6 terabytes for 1.3 billion songs is about 7 kilobytes per song. If it is MIDI, that would work. Not mp3.

Re: Numbers donâ(TM)t add up

[Anonymous Coward]

...and i cannot lie

292 billion What's App apps?

[rsilvergun]

Man, Jared and Ivanka need to go easy. That's nearly as many tweets as the old man did last month.

Porn

[Sarusa]

That's a lot of bums watching a lot of porn. Who handles the cleaning of these?

Perhaps someone swapped a . for a ,

[Joseph Ward]

If you look at the actual data https://data.cityofnewyork.us/... [cityofnewyork.us] back in January, 2018 it was 8,597 cumulative Terabytes not 8.597 US vs international notation. with that much data the other indicators make more sense, like a billion songs

Re:

[Anubis IV]

Thanks for finding that. I was wondering how 6M people could have used less data in several months than some of us can go through by ourselves. I had figured the rollout was a bust with a number like that, so I was confused by the glowing review in the summary. Increasing the number by a factor of 1000 makes it a LOT more believable.