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New York City's WiFi kiosks have over 5 million users
New York City's high-speed WiFi kiosks have been around for a while, but just how many people are using them? Quite a few, in fact. The LinkNYC team has revealed that there were over 5 million registered WiFi users as of September 2018, with over a billion sessions spread across the 1,700-plus units in the city. People make over 500,000 calls every month, too, although it's not clear how many of those were ice cream truck pranksters. You can safely presume that there's plenty of demand.
As VentureBeat reported, though, these kiosks haven't been without their share of concerns. They're ad-subsidized, but they've barely earned enough to meet the CityBridge consortium's minimum guarantee. The group also removed the kiosks' web browsers after complains of people surfing porn sites or hogging the machines. There's also the concerns about privacy given the presences of cameras and sensors on every kiosk, although Intersection (a part of CityBridge) has stressed that it doesn't collect sensitive info like exact locations or browser history.
Previously: Ten Thousand NYC Pay Phones to Become Free Wi-Fi Hot Spots
New York City to Install 7,500 Wi-Fi Kiosks
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @04:01AM
n/t
(Score: 1) by fortyseven on Wednesday October 03 2018, @02:01PM
5 million doesn't seem like so many considering NYC gets 60 million tourists a year.
Those 10 foot high monoliths just look crazy. Sometimes there are several of them within a few feet of each other. They also seem to be lacking advertisers - most of the time they are just giving a historical fact about NYC or going into time/weather mode. I imagine my tax dollars will be subsidizing these soon.
One of the touted benefits was to bring internet to every community but 99% of these kiosks are in upper middle class - wealthy or business neighborhoods.
Luckily most of the cameras get covered by post-its or scratchitti pretty soon after going up.