Pathetic 5G pole position

THE CITY 

Supertall 5G-transmitting “smart poles” destined to sit atop LinkNYC kiosks won’t roll out until later this spring, but one early version of the 32-foot-tall towers stands alone on a quiet street in Queens, offering a first glimpse of how hundreds more could pockmark the city.

The new structure in Long Island City is dystopian future chic, with its steely exterior and technical components emitting vibes both familiar and alien to passersby.

“After like a day or two of walking around it, it blends in,” said Walter Cannon, vice president for business development at ZenFi Networks, a digital infrastructure company investing $200 million in CityBridge LLC, the private consortium behind LinkNYC and its successor, Link5G.

The city’s only Link5G so far, at the corner of 30th Place and Hunters Point Avenue, is just used for testing, Cannon explained. It doesn’t have a screen for digital advertisements like the 1,816 LinkNYC kiosks citywide, but future versions will.

The installation of Link5G in commercial and manufacturing zones could begin as early as April, May or June, Cannon noted.

The reboot of LinkNYC will add fifth-generation cellular network technology, on top of existing features like free Wi-Fi, a 911 button and USB chargers. Multiple telecom companies are in talks to house their 5G equipment in compartments in the upper chambers of the poles, Cannon said.

In addition to selling ads as it has been, CityBridge is also poised to make money by selling space to telecommunications giants — like AT&T and Verizon — to house their speedy 5G tech.

But unlike the free Wi-Fi, consumers will have to pay for service via their data plans. And under an amendment to the deal signed last year, the city is promised a much smaller cut — as little as $3 million a year — after CityBridge fell far short on past revenue projections.

Reps from the city Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) emphasize that Link5G-funded expansion of Wi-Fi and other LinkNYC services to neighborhoods that have not been served before comes “free” of charge to taxpayers, and that CityBridge agreed to pay the city for the privilege of providing the service.

“Importantly, and key to understanding why DoITT ultimately chose to reboot the program, the city has never spent a dime on the program,” said Brett Sikoff, a DoITT official, during a presentation on Link5G at the Public Design Commission meeting in December.

That should raise red flags, concerned observers warn, considering the history of LinkNYC, which has seen several snafus since it started in 2016 with promises of bridging the digital divide.

“There’s a cost of free things,” said Sean Khorsandi, executive director of the Manhattan-based neighborhood preservation group Landmarks West!, which opposed LinkNYC and now opposes Link5G for the kiosks’ size, look and tendency to attract loiterers.

“There’s ways of integrating this type of equipment on existing infrastructure,” said Khorsandi, who teaches design and architecture at the New York Institute of Technology. “You don’t need to build these lollipops in the middle of the street.”

On the first day of Christmas, de Blasio gave to NYC, a 30 foot tall LinkNYC

The Blaz found some new boondoggle to induce on the city during his last days while he's busy slaughtering trees and destroying a park for his donor overlords.

 

Maya Wiley left lower income neighborhoods hanging without free internet

Getting free wifi 2 all is best boss @BilldeBlasio & best partners @colin_odonnell @ScottGoldsmith3 #LinkNYC pic.twitter.com/Xmr5BEahJD

— Maya Wiley (@mayawiley) February 18, 2016

 

 

 THE CITY

When Maya Wiley went to work as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s legal counsel shortly after he took office in 2014, he asked her to figure out how to bridge the digital divide by bringing broadband to low-income neighborhoods.

“I thought, ‘Oh, s—t!’ I said we needed it. I didn’t know how to get it,” Wiley recalled on the Technopolis podcast posted in June 2019.

The civil rights attorney had captured de Blasio’s attention after she wrote a piece in The Nation urging him to “build more community broadband” in an effort to forge “stronger, fairer and more resilient communities.”

But nearly eight years later, during a pandemic that has moved much of work and school online, the de Blasio administration is still struggling to make that a reality. City officials say they are now “actively reviewing proposals” from firms that responded to a highly anticipated request for proposals the mayor’s office issued in March. The city has set aside $157 million for the first portion of its ballyhooed Internet Master Plan.

Meanwhile, some 1.5 million New Yorkers, including many living in public housing, lack broadband access or mobile internet connection, according to city estimates.

“We’ve been let down too long,” said Danny Barber, chairperson of Citywide Council of Presidents, NYCHA’s tenant leadership panel.

“There are thousands of homes where kids are failing or have failed thus far with schooling due to lack of accessibility,” added Barber, who has endorsed Ray McGuire

 Now Wiley is running for her old boss’ job, looking to both distance herself from him and tout herself as the candidate primed to deliver on the progressive promises of a mayor who critics say failed on his pledge to rewrite “a tale of two cities.”

Her record as de Blasio’s counsel during his ethics flaps and as his appointee to head the Civilian Complaint Review Board have drawn far more attention than her role as the would-be bridger of the digital divide.

Wiley has long blamed de Blasio and her multiple predecessors for failing to deliver WiFi for the masses. “It’s continuously been delayed due to a lack of urgency, vision and attention,” she told THE CITY in a statement in January.

Julia Savel, a spokesperson for Wiley’s campaign, declined multiple opportunities to offer additional comment.

An examination of Wiley’s role in the LinkNYC kiosk deal that aimed to connect many New Yorkers reveals a more complex accounting of why legions have been left in the digital dust.

The lack of broadband connectivity was highlighted by the pandemic when low-income New Yorkers struggled to get online to do everything from attend school classes to schedule telehealth medical appointments to work remotely.

Some were even seen sitting outside the 207 closed libraries that continued to boost free Wi-Fi outside.

“The political capital behind the idea that we needed to get broadband networks everywhere, and get everyone on them, increased dramatically in March of 2020,” said Blair Levin, who handled broadband expansion at the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama administration.

“COVID demonstrated painfully to people like me how important it was to make sure that there were networks everywhere and everyone was on them,” he added.

Wiley prides herself for launching free internet access to residents at the NYCHA Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing complex in the nation with more than 6,000 people, many of whom are Black and Hispanic.

In her digital role for the de Blasio administration, she also “helped negotiate and supported the launch of the LinkNYC franchise,” according to the bio at The New School, where she teaches.

The plan was to convert landline pay phone locations into sleek kiosks with Wi-Fi hotspots, phone capabilities and a tablet touchscreen that could connect users to city services, such as the information and complaint hotline 311. The kiosks would be paid for by revenue from advertisements while bringing in $500 million for the city over the span of the agreement, which was initially 12 years.

In 2014, a consortium of private companies called CityBridge signed a franchise agreement under which it promised to install 7,500 operational kiosks within a decade. Two years later, Wiley celebrated the arrival of the first kiosks with a tweet declaring de Blasio the “best boss.”

The original deal included an initial 500 kiosks that wouldn’t have offered advertising, but would have provided some internet service for digital deserts. The number of those kiosks would have eventually expanded to 1,500.

“A targeted phase-in schedule provides for an equitable distribution of the new structures across the five boroughs within four years,” de Blasio’s office trumpeted at the time.

But that part of the deal was pulled because, City Hall later said, those kiosks were incompatible with the LinkNYC system.

 

Link NYC kiosks causing problems

From CBS 2:

More than 1,700 kiosks across the city offer free Wi-Fi calls and USB ports to charge devices.

But it turns out those ports are causing concern for some New Yorkers, who say the kiosks have become hangouts for the homeless, CBS2’s Reena Roy reported Wednesday.