I spotted a handful of newly installed, as yet unactivated LinkNYC kiosks along First Avenue in Manhattan. I don’t know when these went up but it has to be fairly recent. This one, on 63rd Street off First Avenue, is one of at least three new installations in the area. It replaced a bank of two working payphones. Neither this Link nor any of the other new ones I spotted appear on any of LinkNYC’s official datasets nor on the Find a Link map, which has not been updated in months.

Data represented on the Find a Link page conflicts with the LinkNYC Status data, which is updated hourly and feeds my data pages showing the reported status of the LinkNYC network’s tablets, telephone, and WiFi. While I question its accuracy I nevertheless mine the dataset for whatever insights it is capable of producing into LinkNYC’s reliability.

Data from the night of the Upper West Side/Midtown West blackout last year showed that a large quantity of Links, about 100 of them, shut down, But data regarding the phone call feature during the blackout is sketchy at best, since it seemed to show that the tablets and WiFi shut off but the phone calling function did not. You can’t make phone calls from those devices if the tablet is off. In fact the phone calling feature, according to CityBridge, is alleged to be functional almost 100% of the time, a claim I don’t think even the most enthusiastic Smart City Evangelist would believe.

Today’s numbers on the kiosks’ tablet status paint what seems to be a more believable picture. 6.17%, or 109 tablets are reported down. But only 9 kiosks are said to have non-working WiFi. The WiFi is one feature of the kiosks I do not use, but in March of last year I gave it a spin and found speeds and connectivity for these things to be all over the place. Some kiosks roared at 300/300, others whimpered at dialup modem-like speeds, others never connected.

With CityBridge’s datasets proving to be unreliable it seems the only way to know where a new kiosk goes up is to encounter it on the street, as I did. It’s notable to me if this means the rollout of LinkNYC has resumed, since there had been virtually no new installations since the summer of 2018, while an unknown number of payphones were removed but never replaced with kiosks. Aside from activation of the Visual Relay Service and a few random content features on the ad screens the LinkNYC program seems to have stagnated.