LinkNYC’s Loudspeakerphone: A Failure With Precedent

Among the most conspicuous and heralded features of LinkNYC, the so-called “payphone of the future”, is its phone calling application. Calls are free to (almost) any U.S. phone number, and by default the voice of whoever you called blasts out over the kiosk’s loudspeaker.

The absence of a telephone handset, and of a coin intake and return mechanism, erased some of the most common maintenance headaches of traditional payphones: Jammed coins, coin collection, and massacred handsets.

Gone, however, is the seemingly quaint notion of having a phone conversation on a public telephone in relative peace and quiet. With Smart City progress comes certain compromises.

But was the handset-free design revolutionary? A first of its kind? The answer is no, and the story helps illustrate how differently the “Smart City” handles pesky matters of public feedback and real-world testing of its products.

The concept of a hands-free speakerphone was first introduced by Bell Labs at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. By 1970 Bell brought the idea to the streets, installing 8 hands-free payphones at New York’s Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, and outdoor locations. TIME magazine described the hands free booths in its May 4, 1970, issue:

There is no receiver–only a steel wall with a grille that hides–and protects–a recessed microphone. A loudspeaker is in the ceiling. Press a button, put in a dime, dial your number, and turn down the volume control if you don’t want all the passers-by to hear the amplified voice of the speaker at the other end of the line.

A hands free device would have relieved Bell of significant maintenance expense, but customers just did not appreciate the broadcast nature of the setup.

Still, Bell persisted. As late as 1972 the company deployed hands-free public telephones in cities nationwide, announcing the new devices via advertisements like this one, from the January 6, 1972, issue of The Yazoo Herald.

To demonstrate the freedom of going hands-free Bell chose the image of a woman whose wrists were bound with what at first blush looked like handcuffs. Whatever material bound her this smiling woman’s demonstration actually highlights the fact that use of the phone could not truly be described as “hands free”, unless one used their nose or other extremity to dial the phone.

Another advertisement, from the April 13, 1972, edition of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania’s Evening Herald, shows a less constrained woman free to rummage through her bag as the voice of the person she called blasts through an overhead loudspeaker.

After testing ended in July, 1972, it appears the public speakerphone disappeared. As TIME magazine concluded:

Gamblers and bookies hate the new phone, lovers are embarrassed by it and just about everyone accustomed to the intimacy provided by a standard receiver feels nervous with it.

The profile of public telephones differed in the 1970s. Public telephones represented a significant part of the fabric of daily life. Customer feedback actually mattered, and Bell Telephone’s real-world testing of new concepts took that into account. Today’s deployment of Smart City phone calling picks up at the same level of stature of the traditional payphones: An afterthought, or rather an excuse for filling our streets with advertising.

Further to that, Bell Telephone had an obligation to its paying customers. LinkNYC does not, and its monopoly power renders the company further immune from responsibility to answer to anyone but politicians and social media influencers.

I don’t know what kind of real-world testing LinkNYC’s kiosks went through, or what kind of user feedback came in, particularly with regard to the phone calling feature, before those machines appeared on the streets. Solicitation of objective feedback appears to have never been much of a priority, and I am left to conclude that real-world testing might as well have never happened.

The latter assumption was buttressed last week, during a sometimes testy Twitter exchange among LinkNYC and some skeptics peppering the company with questions in response to a New York Times opinion piece. I’m not even going to touch the frivolous claims made in that eyeroll-inducingTimes piece. But one nugget that came out of the Twitter exchange involves the sensors, those Big Brother zombielords many fear track our every move.

The sensors don’t even work. How could they? Those LinkNYC kiosks make a lot of noise just sitting there. Compared to their payphone forebears, which mostly function completely off the electrical grid, LinkNYC machines are energy-guzzling monsters. The amount of white noise they generate reflects that.

This little revelation further proves CityBridge submitted these kiosks to little if any real world testing before the kiosks went live on the streets. It’s one thing to download a piece of software that is flagged as “beta”. If it doesn’t work you just get rid of it. We have no option to delete LinkNYC.