The recent announcement that a small number of the New York City’s payphone enclosures had been crowned with Wi-Fi antennæ seemed to attract a level of attention far out of proportion to its real significance.

10 payphone locations now offer free Wi-Fi access as part of a pilot program to determine public interest in the service. It’s free to use so long as you bring your own $300+ mobile gadget (which probably has a $1000/year data plan connected to it) or a similarly non-free tablet or laptop with Wi-Fi access.

Locations for these Wi-Fi-friendly payphone kiosks and other NYC Public Wi-Fi Hotspots can be seen at the city’s Foursquare page.

The story may have spread for its apparent irony. Old-fashioned payphones being leveraged for more modern and buzzword-worthy communication protocols is a tasty webnews bit which inspired surprising numbers of people with no knowledge of public telephony to make sarcastic and ignorant comments about the state of payphones today. But the details of this Wi-Fi pilot program do not support the conclusions many seem to have reached.

Payphones would not be transformed or usurped by the placement of Wi-Fi antennæ on their rooftops. In fact the pilot program has almost nothing to do with payphones. No public telephones were converted, replaced, or otherwise murdered by the addition of Wi-Fi antennæ to their rooftops. The public telephone locations have been leveraged to make free Wi-Fi available in certain strategically-chosen spots. This move takes advantage of the fact that New York City still has a lot of payphones and it leverages the telecommunications expertise of the companies that own the phones. These companies (Van Wagner and Titan) paid for the equipment (I guess the city didn’t want to be accused of taking money away from its bike lanes) at a cost of about $2000 for each location. The pilot program offers free Wi-Fi for now but the goal, it seems, is to gauge public interest in the service to see if it could be successfully monetized. This could potentially add another subsidy to payphones. Virtually all public telephones lose money these days, with their continued existence dependent on subsidies such as revenues from display advertising and income from other branches of the payphone companies’ businesses.

This is not the first time Wi-Fi antennæ have been added to New York City’s public phones. In 2003 Verizon offered free Wi-Fi to its DSL customers, installing Wi-Fi transmitters on top of a whopping 1,000 public telephone locations across the city. That initiative makes the recent installation of 10 hotspots seem rather unambitious by comparison.

In 2004 TCC Teleplex’s web phones offered pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi access, pre-empting all latecomers with its “payphone of the future” – a device that was evidently well ahead of its time and which I think deserves proper respect in the august annals of payphone history.

Teleplex’s service survived for a number of years, and the company announced plans to upgrade their web phones with a newer “green” model in 2012. But Verizon’s more ambitious plan to blanket the city with Wi-Fi went nowhere. To this day, though, you can still see a few of those old Wi-Fi antennæ atop some older payphone enclosures.

Believe it or not the city of New York is not interested in eliminating public telephones from its streets. The city reports that 27,000,000 calls were made from New York City payphones in 2011. 27 million. That’s like one million with 27 Ms, 54 Is, 54 Ls, 27 Os, and 27 Ns.

“Statistics provided by ten current payphone franchisees that operate a total of 11,997 payphones show that more than 27 million calls (6 calls per phone per day on average) were made in 2011, not including 911 calls. There is also still significant usage of sidewalk payphones to place 911 calls.”
(Source: NYC.gov)

That’s an interesting statistic. There are said to be about 12,000 payphones in New York but I wonder if that figure includes the seeming majority of public phones that do not actually work, or which are “restricted except 911“.. If half the payphones don’t work then the real average of calls made per working payphone might be more like 12 calls a day. At 25¢ a call that means an average payphone could bring in a sizzling seventy-five bucks a month from coin-fed calls.

The reality of payphone usage might differ from the general public’s assumptions, but the facts prove that people still use payphones. Unlike the well-heeled techies of 2012 who have graduated from one empowering communications technology to another and then another, people who use payphones today do not think of the devices as bedraggled obscuriosities. Public telephones remain a valuable link for a lot of people. Some day you might be one of them.

Underlining the free Wi-Fi initiative is an assumption I don’t fully understand: Wi-Fi everywhere is always a good thing. What? Why? I mean, Wi? Free Wi-Fi over unsecured public networks sounds like every opportunity for unencrypted communications to be scooped up by the likes of a rogue do-it-yourself Street View clone and blasted into the public domain. Is cell phone and mobile Internet connectivity that bad in New York that this fallback is fundamentally in the public interest? I would think this type of service could be more meaningfully targeted toward rural areas with poor communication infrastructures, not densely-populated hypermodern cities with abundant technology options.

I tried out the free Wi-Fi service at the Steinway Street location. I am not one to complain about free services but I don’t think it is a complaint to state the obvious: the service worked but it was painfully slow, reminding me of days spent waiting a half-hour for images to show up on web pages downloaded through a 1200-baud modem. Sitting well within the promised 150-200 foot range of the Wi-Fi signal I sat on a public bench and got to a couple of web pages, spotted an unexpected message from an ex-girlfriend, SSHed in to one of my web servers, and ran a gamut of protocols just to see if this public Wi-Fi filtered any type of network traffic. It didn’t seem to, though my test was not intended to be comprehensive. I did not attempt to use this signal to make a Wi-Fi phone call but I might attempt that another time and report back.

I get far better signal strength from the Wi-Fi at the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library – a location which also offers Ethernet Internet access, free power outlets, and air conditioning to boot. I don’t see myself changing my current mobile Internet habits in favor of sitting out on Steinway Street or finding a place to sit near one of the other street-side Wi-Fi payphone kiosks. Maybe others will find value in it, but in its current state I don’t see where stationary access to an extremely weak Wi-Fi signal will interest an audience that has plenty of other options.

UPDATE: August 6, 2012:
I helped an NPR reporter put together a story about these Wi-Fi-enabled payphones for “All Things Considered” Ironically enough, as we tried the Steinway Street payphone’s Wi-Fi we spotted this woman using one of the payphones, but no one else using the Wi-Fi. This proves, once again, that People Still Use Payphones.

I also gave another Wi-Fi payphone a try. This one was on Broadway near Columbus Circle. That Wi-Fi signal performed considerably better than the one on Steinway Street. My only gripe is that it took several minutes to fully connect, since the Wi-Fi access point took 2 or 3 minutes to appear on my device.

I snapped a picture of the payphone enclosure. I did not realize this at the time but in this picture too I see the irony again. While no one else appeared to be using the Wi-Fi the picture shows someone standing in the payphone enclosure using the payphone!