LinkNYC: No Free Phone Calls Today

It is probably just a temporary glitch, but my attempts today to make phone calls through LinkNYC devices all failed. As the video below demonstrates, any number I dialed was met with a message complaining that I do not have enough Vonage credits to make this call. Did someone at Citybridge fail to pay their Vonage bill? Watch below as I attempt to dial 212-555-1212 under the watchful eye of  LinkNYC’s camera.

This and other attempts to make phone calls today were made through LinkNYC’s more recently installed devices on Broadway in Astoria. I had written earlier that calls made through LinkNYC devices were dodgy in terms of actually connecting. As much as half the time, I found, calls simply did not go through. This time calls altogether failed.

In the past this message about Vonage credits was heard when attempting to call certain pay-per-minute lines. Today the message played after just about any number I dialed. The only number that connected was 411, the enhanced directory assistance. 311 failed to connect. I did not try 911 because it would be EVIL to dial that number when no emergency is in progress (although I’ve seen plenty of kids do it).  I also did not try any of the networked apps.

Citybridge has removed that annoying word “BETA” from LinkNYC devices, suggesting outages like this are what we could expect from this product going forward. Once again, it looks like the so-called “payphone of the future” is going to be even less reliable than the purportedly primitive devices they replaced.

I was actually starting to think that Citybridge installed these devices in Astoria and just forgot about them. They’ve been in place for several months and functioned as nothing more than idle monoliths for a good portion of that time. Since being activated I have not seen a single advertisement flow through those mammoth LED screens. Advertising is, for all practical purposes, the only reason these things exist. The free phone calls and access to city services are all well and good but if it’s not being monetized it cannot survive.

At the moment it looks like every single LinkNYC device in Astoria has something about it that does not work. In some cases one or both of the 55″ ad panels are dark. In other cases the ad panels are lit but the tablet is down for “maintenance”. On another Link it appears nothing works, although I noticed somebody using the phone charger on a device that appeared to be completely turned off.

The most pressing problem for the future of these devices in Astoria, however, is that they contain no advertisements.

Something else I notice more than I used to is how much noise these things make. It mostly gets swallowed up in the normal flow of street noise but if you get close to one of these things it sounds like an air conditioner, or the engine of an idling truck:

My interest in making calls from LinkNYC devices has nothing to do with calling other people. I use Links to gather ambient sounds in an effort to continue my long-running project of using traditional payphones to capture sounds of nearby street musicians, subway buskers, and whatever audio from the city might sound interesting when heard through the grey, gravelly, monochrome sound of the landline.

Using LinkNYC for this project has both advantages and disadvantages. I can accumulate far more content but audio quality is so bad that the amount of usable material is limited. At present I have several hours of these LinkNYC recordings which I intend to sort through end edit into a single piece.

I have not listened to a lot of this material yet but from what I have heard it has been surprising to see (or hear) how easily a LinkNYC device can be turned into something of a spy machine for the common man. Though barely audible in its raw form I expect that with software enhancement I will be able to pretty clearly hear full conversations between people who happened to be standing near a LinkNYC device as they spoke. I’ve also heard ranters and drunk people screaming into the air, as we are wont to do.

Capturing these sounds had, of course, always been possible with payphones. But the quantity of material I could gather was limited by how many quarters I could afford to feed into the phones and by time limits on both the calls and the voicemail recordings. LinkNYC’s phone calls have no official time limits, although calls tend to get cut off seemingly at random.

The project has a potential to sound like a kind of street radio. It is a new sound. I am enjoying it. Maybe you will too, once I get my sound-editing chops up to speed.