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If you wander around the streets of New York City, you’ll eventually run into rectangular structures the size of small trees in areas filled with pedestrians. Aside from being gigantic billboards, these kiosks are part of the new Link NYC initiative to replace payphones in the city with high-tech information centers. Each Link NYC kiosk has a tablet on its edge that you can use to browse the web, look up local information, make free phone calls, and finddirections to your next destination. There are also a couple USB ports that you can use to charge your devices and even a headphone jack so you can make calls with a little more privacy.
If you don’t like the idea of standing in front of this kiosk to do your web searching, they also have free Wi-Fi networks you can connect to with your own smartphone or tablet. However, since the program is still in beta, only certain Apple products can connect to a private Wi-Fi network with a key; Android devices are limited to the free Wi-Fi network.
Link NYC is a new program, so you won’t find these kiosks in each of the five boroughs yet. Currently the kiosks are spread out around Manhattan and Queens, and there are plans to install a total of 7,500 stations around the city over the next few years. Link NYC explains on its website that all the money used to build these kiosks comes from partnerships and advertising (which makes sense, since most of the surface area of each kiosk is covered in scrolling ads), so taxpayers money isn’t used in the program. The way Link NYC pays for these kiosks is also how it makes money: sponsorship and advertiser money generates money from the program, allowing Link NYC to maintain each station.
We trekked into Queens to try one of them out—check out the video above to see what we found.
