The month of May has come and gone and, as I expected, CityBridge has failed to produce, for the public at least, a promised real-time monitoring for its network of LinkNYC digital advertising billboards. In April GovTech.com reported “with an Internet of Thing-like paradigm, [LinkNYC] will set up a program to monitor in real time which [kiosks] aren’t working.”

First off, I fail to see how monitoring a network of Internet-connected kiosks has anything to do with the Internet of Things, or as GovTech strangely put it: “Internet of Thing-like”. The IoT refers to everyday objects embedded with Internet connectivity, allowing the object to send or receive data. This makes possible small miracles like remotely controlling a stuffed animal or transmitting body temperature information from your underpants. LinkNYC kiosks themselves might fall into the IoT category but monitoring them does not.

It remains to be seen if announcing public access to real-time data and never delivering it amounts to another lie that disappears into the digital slipstream along with (among other fibs) the idea that bus arrival times are actually appearing on these kiosks, or the notion that it is even physically possible to register for health insurance at the New York State of Health website using only a LinkNYC kiosk. Bus arrival times appeared on kiosks city-wide for a few days in April before being quietly removed. No announcement was made, as far as I know, but I think it is safe to assume the feature was taken away because it sucked so badly.

It baffles me that a network like LinkNYC could be built or even conceptualized without any kind of automated monitoring built in from the ground up. How can you stick thousands of these kiosks everywhere from busy intersections to people’s living room windows with no way of knowing how many of them actually work? Even the old payphones have that kind of polling functionality.

So far it seems like LinkNYC’s techniques of monitoring its network have been limited to physical inspections, 311 complaints, and notices from citizens on social media and through direct communications. None of these approaches seem to be effective, given the long-term status of many kiosks which I know have essentially never worked. The physical inspections seem to focus on cosmetic cleanliness (including removal of the strips of tape placed over the surveillance cameras) and simply seeing if the tablet screen is turned on. The touch-screen functionality of certain screens I know of have not worked in at least a year, and that assumes they ever worked at all. The phone call functionality, which I wrote about last year as being unreliable, seems to have improved, but making calls through these kiosks remains a hit-or-miss affair. Now, even if a call connects, it is likely to disconnect without warning either within seconds or after just a few minutes. Similar to last year, I still encounter many kiosks where a call looks like it connected, with the timer ticking, but the party being called hears nothing. For phone calls these kiosks are genuinely no more reliable than the old payphones they are replacing.

I don’t know what kind of remote monitoring would help diagnose LinkNYC kiosks’ poor phone call quality or availability, but physical inspections do not seem to take these matters into consideration. If CityBridge really does make real-time data available as promised I think it will be limited or somehow whitewashed, so as to prevent embarrassment.

It is not clear from the GovTech article exactly what data LinkNYC would publish, but with regard to at least one data point I could see the value: Someone wants to take their laptop and work outside using a kiosk’s free WiFi, but they don’t want to have the experience I did a few months ago in finding that LinkNYC’s Wi-Fi is often either slow as hell or does not work at all. Real-time access to which kiosks actually have working Wi-Fi, and at what speed, would seem to have merit.

But what real value is there in publishing the functional status of the tablet devices? If you are like me you might want to know where the non-working tablets are so you could attempt to make artistic use of them. But who is going to be sitting at their desktop computer or poking around on their smartphone looking for a place to use the Aunt Bertha app or to make a phone call? The city claimed: “This real-time, up-to-the-hour monitoring will ensure residents are able to find free phones that are working whenever they need one.” I shouldn’t dismiss the scenario altogether but using your phone to find a phone sounds like an idea for some kind of gag smartphone app.

LinkNYC data that is presently available at the city’s Open Data portal includes kiosk locations (present and future) and limited usage statistics. You can also see what kind of complaints are being made about the kiosks by searching the 311 dataset for “LinkNYC” (don’t give up waiting, searching 311 data can be slower than LinkNYC’s WiFi). The 311 records for LinkNYC kiosks number 353 at this moment, but data regarding complaints made during the first 7 months of the rollout have been selectively excised. There must have been thousands of complaints regarding the encampments and loiterers at the LinkNYC kiosks, but that data has been conveniently expunged in what appears to be a deliberate act of Smart City whitewashing. I also find it revealing that the 311 website has no category for complaints about the encampments or other quality of life issues created by the kiosks.

Usage statistics include bandwidth consumption (who really cares?) and session length. Only Wi-Fi usage is being recorded. No information on how many people use the tablets or for what purpose is available. I am going to look more at what LinkNYC data is available (and what is not) in another posting.

Another NYC.gov dataset includes LinkNYC 311 Call Center data but I’m not not sure what to make of it since it does not detail what the calls were about, and because it includes data going back to 2012, years before the kiosks even existed.

Real-time data on how many kiosks are working could expose a lot of sundry and not necessarily positive information about the reality of these kiosks. Will it ever happen? Only the Smart City knows.