Signs of Life in the LinkNYC Rollout?

It looks like some small signs of life emerged in the past two months in the rollout of the long-stagnant LinkNYC program. While the number of new kiosk installations appears to remain at zero for calendar year 2020 CityBridge at least seems finally to have activated some of the dozens of kiosks installed but never activated.

Some of these kiosks have been out there, doing absolutely nothing but taking up space, for 3 years.

The number of useless kiosks dropped from 52 to 45, with these 7 activations occurring in October and November:

• 30 VARICK STREET (tablet is already down)
• 118 VARICK STREET
• 180 VARICK STREET
• 741 COLUMBUS AVENUE
• 638 COLUMBUS AVENUE
• 715 COLUMBUS AVENUE
• 661 COLUMBUS AVENUE

One tablet device among these newly-activated kiosks is already reported down, while the WiFi status for two of these is listed as “null”. The only two possible fields for that data point should be “up” and “down”, so I don’t know if “null” means the WiFi is down or if the polling mechanism used to test it does not work.

As typical for a majority of LinkNYC deployments, these kiosks are not in areas where free WiFi would fill much of a need among poorer New Yorkers without access to reliable or broadband home internet. Kiosks tend to end up where CityBridge can expect to make the most money from advertising revenue.

It’s hard to know what to expect of the LinkNYC rollout at this point. We were promised transparency on a variety of matters, such as approval processes for when and where new installations were planned, and how much usage the kiosks got.

But it’s been since well before the pandemic that publication of almost all datasets regarding LinkNYC stopped, save for the one I use to generate the reports on functional status of the kiosks’ various functions. That data is only half-baked anyway, with some quality data and a lot of obviously false information.

It would have been interesting to see what impact, if any, the pandemic had on usage. Did people cancel their cell phone plans and flock to the free phone calls offered by Links? Did they cancel home ISPs and rely on LinkNYC’s free WiFi more than before? No way to know since the usage dataset ceased being published late last year.