A few weeks ago I made a bunch of phone calls using LinkNYC devices, the so-called “payphone of the future” that is routing out traditional public pay telephones in New York City. There was no one I needed to call. When I need to call somebody I prefer not to use a device which, by default, makes both sides of the conversation loud enough for all to hear. This short video demonstrates the brave new world of making a phone call using LinkNYC (the recording quality via a Galaxy Note 5 does not do justice to just how loudly this man was yelling):
My interest in using LinkNYC for phone calls was to continue my project of recording ambient sounds and the music of street and subway buskers using traditional landline public pay telephones. I admit that this project has become a little long in the tooth, but ever the digital hoarder I every once in a while drop a quarter into a payphone in the hope that the phone will work and that it will capture the sound of a nearby musician — or maybe a jackhammer. Here is the sound I captured of a not-particularly-excellent saxophonist heard through a payphone on 47th Street and Eighth Avenue a few weeks ago:
Months ago I attempted to continue this pursuit of recording street sounds using LinkNYC devices, but decided it was a waste of time. Call quality on LinkNYC devices is quite bad for this purpose. Instead of the relatively steady, gravelly, monochrome sound of the landline the Link devices capture an aural squall of unfiltered noise splattered with VoIP artifacts. What makes this disappointing is that the person you call — their voice coming through the Link device’s loudspeaker or through your headphones — actually sounds quite clear. But to the person you are calling the only way to be clearly understood is to scream loudly, as demonstrated by the gentleman in that short video above.
Nevertheless, walking down Eighth Avenue in Manhattan I dialed in to my ambient sound project again, to see if by some chance call quality on LinkNYC devices had improved.
It had not. That was not surprising, but something else I discovered was. I found that as much as half the time (if not more) the phone calls I attempted to make with these devices simply did not go through. Over a period of about 40 minutes I walked from 57th Street and Eighth Avenue down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street. In that time I stopped at about 13 or 14 Link devices and dialed up my Skype voicemail number. When I checked the voicemail later I found that only five or six of the calls had been received. Since then, out of curiosity, I’ve attempted to place numerous calls from LinkNYC devices. I have not kept count of the success and failure rates but I can say with certainty that completing phone calls on these devices seems to be a matter of luck.
The messages on the tablet screen would make you think the call had connected. These messages say “Ringing”, “Connecting”, and then a timer appears to indicate how long you have supposedly been connected. But in fact as many as (if not more than) half the calls I tried to make did not actually go through. This pattern held true regardless of what kind of number I called, landline or VOIP.
On some Link devices I was able to connect after dialing a number three or four times. On others I just gave up.
Many of the Links simply did not work for other reasons. Some of the tablets, after I dialed a number, returned a message saying that Vonage could not reach the Internet. Other more cryptic error messages said something that I had found a bug in their system. That sort of thing is to be expected with outdoor electronic street furniture, even if the propaganda we’ve been fed suggests we should have expected better from the so-called “payphone of the future”.
Links, it turns out, are as unreliable as traditional payphones — if not more so — when it comes to making phone calls. One hopes access to 911 emergency dispatchers is not similarly handicapped.
Considering the well-documented track record of poor planning that went into the LinkNYC rollout it should not particularly surprise anyone that one of the Links marquee features – the free phone call – only “sorta kinda” works. It does not appear that phone calls are included in NYC OpenData’s LinkNYC Usage Statistics, but records of the quantity and duration of phone calls made from Links are almost certainly being kept. Perhaps an audit would reveal that phantom phone calls such as the ones I tried to make are being tallied as completed phone calls, bloating those usage statistics with bad data.
I am not much of a money or numbers guy but something I had not contemplated before came to mind with regard to the half a billion dollars promised to the city over a 12-year period (that’s chump change, by the way): Are Links actually going to make less money than the payphones did? The old payphones generally have three advertising panels each. Links only have two. And in many cases the old payphones are found in groups of 2 or more, making room for either more individual ads or over-sized panels. I know very little about the economics and psychology of advertising but a static display ad that is always visible sounds more valuable than one that appears for just a few seconds, and with less visual coverage.
Curious about the quality of the Links’ phone calls I made another unexpected discovery. Calls to certain area codes and exchanges are now blocked. I refer specifically to the likes of numbers owned by AUDIONOW, a service which allows you to tune in to a range of radio stations via telephone. Almost all of AUDIONOW’s published phone numbers are in the 712 area code, with the 432 exchange. This would make it appear that AUDIONOW is based in rural Iowa but the company’s offices are actually in Washington, D.C.
It is not surprising that Vonage would choose to block free access to these numbers from LinkNYC devices. What is surprising is that unlimited access was ever allowed in the first place. The 712 area code is an epicenter of the murky world of Traffic Pumping, a sketchy practice used by rural telcos and their business partners to exploit an FCC loophole that lets them wring money out of bigger telephone companies. The practice, which subsidizes seemingly innocuous services like freeconferencecall.com, also pumps money into the sometimes shady world of talkee.com and countless sex chat lines, all of which used to be available through LinkNYC.
Newer apps on LinkNYC devices include Weather, MTA Transit Status, and Bertha. The weather app seemed easy enough on the eyes but I found the MTA and Bertha apps just about impossible to read without pulling up a milk crate or an easy chair to see the screen at eye level.