UNLINKED Where are Downtown’s LinkNYC free wifi sites?
BY DENNIS LYNCH The city has been installing its LinkNYC free wifi kiosks like mad throughout the five boroughs — more than 800 citywide so far — but you wouldn’t know it if you took a stroll anywhere south of Worth Street. But don’t feel too neglected, Downtowners — the city’s LinkNYC contractor, CityBridge, has plans to expand into the neighborhood this year, a spokesperson told Downtown Express. It’s just not clear where yet — but we can offer an educated guess based on how CityBridge has expanded around the city so far. The stated goal of the LinkNYC program was to replace the city’s ubiquitous but rather obsolete payphones with services more relevant to 21st-century living — namely free wifi, mobile phone charging, and video advertising. So CityBridge has literally been following the map of payphones around the city, laying the fiber optic lines up
NYC
Downtown certainly has lots of payphones, which is where LinkNYC installs its free-wifi kiosks.
and down streets and avenues as they go. They started on the west side of Manhattan, “where the internet infrastructure begins” on the island, according to CityBridge, and have been working their way up, down, and across major avenues and streets. Then they lay cables onto smaller streets branchDowntownExpress.com
ing from those larger ones. Kiosks now line Eighth Avenue, Broadway north of W. 66th Street, 14th Street, and Third Avenue. And CityBridge has started to expand in the area between Eighth and Third Avenues in Midtown. If you want to guess where they might come in Lower Manhattan, just look at the payphone map. It turns out there were a whole lot of payphones in Lower Manhattan. So far CityBridge has installed a few on Lafayette north of the City Center and near Allen Street in the Lower East Side. If they continue their practice of installing along main thoroughfares, Broadway is probably the best guess for what street CityBridge will use to reach into Lower Manhattan. The entire LinkNYC program started last year and will take until 2022 to complete installation of the 7,500 total kiosks the city hired CityBridge to install. How that final rollout will look is unclear at the moment, according to the CityBridge spokesperson. In the meantime, you can make use of the Downtown Alliance’s free wifi network, which mostly covers Broadway, and from the Seaport to the east side of The Battery, concentrated around Water Street. The Alliance will soon expand the service along Broad Street. LinkNYC claims that it provides wifi Internet speeds “100 times faster than average public wifi,” so the Alliance will definitely have some competition once CityBridge expands the program southward — but the former’s wifi network isn’t “average,” according Alliance reps. Hurricane Sandy didn’t do a whole lot of good for Downtown, but Internet providers have installed far faster and more robust networks since then, because much of their infrastructure, such as underground copper wires, was totally destroyed in the storm. The Alliance runs its wifi off those networks, and reps said typical speeds are between 50–75 megabytes per second, and 25 megabytes per second at its slowest.
LinkNYC
A look at LinkNYC’s map of its free-wifi kiosks could make Downtowners feel kind of neglected.
Downtown Alliance
The Downtown Alliance already offers free wifi in several parts of the neighborhood, and plans to continue expanding the service.
April 06 – April 19, 2017
11