I tried over a dozen times yesterday to do something that used to be so simple: Make a phone call. I was met with a failure rate of 100%. Calls looked like they connected to my Payphone Radio call-in number (212-255-2748) but either nothing was heard through the loudspeaker or the line just rang continuously.

I’m not saying the payphones were more reliable… but the payphones were more reliable. In many cases they were also clustered together such that if one didn’t work you could likely find one right next to it that did. Link kiosks cannot be placed within 150 feet of each other, a distance that can seem awfully far when you really need to make a phone call.

When my Softee nonsense was in full swing I might have made 100 calls from these kiosks in a day. In the process I rediscovered the fact that about ½ the calls I made behaved in ways identical to what happened in the above video.

In fact this had been the case since day 1 of the program in 2016. I posted in 2018 that the much touted “ability” to make phone calls from these things should more accurately be described as a possibility. Like almost anything else about these kiosks, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

CityBridge originally used Vonage as their VOIP provider. They later switched to RingCentral but the call reliability problem persisted, suggesting the issue is not with the VOIP provider but with the kiosks themselves.

Until yesterday I still would have expected at least one of these machines to successfully make a call. Nothing doing. They took away your payphones and gave you this instead. It doesn’t work but that’s OK, right? It’s Smart. It’s beta, though it feels more like we are the product being tested.

If these kiosks ever underwent real world testing before their appearance on city sidewalks it must have been cursory at best. It does not appear that anyone at CityBridge owns or even cares about this product except to be sure the ad panels work. Those screens are, in fact, considerably more reliable than anything else on the devices, though it is not unusual to see LinkNYC ad screens go dark.

The “Find Your Way” links are also basically useless. I am almost certain these things used to work but today I cannot find a single kiosk where this feature does what it is supposed to do.

By touching the “Find coffee” tile one would allegedly be presented with a map showing locations of nearby coffee shops, ATMs, and public bathrooms — a rather pedestrian and limited choice of categories if you ask me but these kiosks’ uninspired product plan is for another discussion.

I found, as recorded to the point of tedium in the video below, that accessing the coffee shop screens in Astoria would direct me to Midtown Manhattan, while doing the same from a Midtown kiosk might tell me that the nearest shops are in Brooklyn. It may seem like trifling matter but I can easily this confusing the hell out of tourists, a demographic often singled out as likely users of the kiosks’ maps and free phone calls. These things simply do not work and it appears nothing can or will be done about it.

The future of LinkNYC seems to be in a kind of limbo. In March, 2020, Jessica Tisch, in one of her first public testimonies after being appointed head of DoITT in late 2019, sounded like LinkNYC’s worst freakin’ nightmare. Openly criticizing the program and even implying DoITT itself would take over management of the kiosks it sounded to this observer like the free ride was over for the abject failure of the LinkNYC program.

Fast forward to May, where Tisch sounds like LinkNYC’s new best friend, sweetening CityBridge’s already sweetheart deal with proposed revisions to the original franchise agreement that can only be described as a gift to CityBridge.

Forget about replacing and supplementing the payphone population of 7,500 with up to 10,000 of these “payphone of the future” kiosks. I always thought this quantity of kiosks was insane. Now the goal is a mere 4,000, to be fitted with 35-foot high 5G antennæ and placed in lower income areas, which until now remain mostly free of Link kiosks.

The genuine good this would accomplish is lost on me. The City is planning a comprehensive 5G rollout utilizing tens of thousands of streetlight poles. Would the quantity of merely 4,000 LinkNYC kiosks somehow compete with that program, or complement it? Why even throw it into the mix?

I also question the recurring tagline about LinkNYC, that it somehow “bridges the digital divide.” I don’t understand how anyone can say that with a straight face. By my estimate the internet computers at public libraries and the unheralded NYCHA Digital Vans are more effective at getting the disenfranchised online.

I could ramble on but all things LinkNYC feel like a hopeless, lost cause. I’m a real beam of sunlight, right? So is this guy.