I don’t know how long this screen had been blasting off like this. I also don’t know if it was fixed because I have not been past this spot since last week, when I caught this pre-sunrise video. It’s enough to make your eyes bleed.

I’ve come to expect that a quantity of LinkNYC’s big advertising screens will be faint, and almost impossible to read. I do not expect something like this, which brought a little splash of Times Square to this sleepy Saturday morning. It could have used a soundtrack.

LinkNYC remains a buggy product, even as the CityBridge monopoly continues scooping up extra municipal privileges to expand its Link5G program. Phone calls made from LinkNYC kiosks work, on average, only about half the time. In my usage many features of the tablet device have been found not to work reliably, or at all. Access to 311, one of the headline features of LinkNYC when the program went live, was blocked for months, as was access to findhelp.org (née Aunt Bertha), the social services app. You can thank me for the fact that access to those services has been restored to LinkNYC’s tablet screens.

With Link5G, which I first visited 7 months ago, CityBridge will plant hundreds, even thousands of 32-foot tall Covid nasal swabs in what are said to be lesser-internet-connected parts of the city.

In their original designs the Link5G monstrosities featured very janky looking placements of advertising panels, the same size as on today’s LinkNYC totems. In this first round of Link5G towers, however, CityBridge dispensed with those panels, and why wouldn’t they? The blink-and-you-miss-it advertising model in which content disappears before you know what you are looking at is a failure.

Revenue from Link5G is supposed to come not from ads but from CityBridge leasing 5G antennæ in the towers to the major telecom providers. The promise from CityBridge is enhanced 5G coverage to areas that would otherwise not get it. There is no guarantee any of the providers (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.) will be on board with this.

Here is what the first Link5G tower, which is a test unit, looked like up close when I spotted it back in March:

Since then a few dozen Link5G towers have popped up in various locations, with thousands more promised. None of today’s Link5G towers do anything but get in your way for now, and none should be functional until sometime next year.

Link5G marks the latest evolution of LinkNYC, the so-called “payphone of the future,” an untested, unasked-for product born of lofty promises and which is thus far a virtually complete failure. With Link5G we shall see if the Smart City just keeps failing up!