NEW YORK — Few New Yorkers, if any, would admit to liking pay phones. They're largely invisible, a ubiquitous background image on a street filled with distractions. Like any public resource in a city of 8.4 million, the phones carry connotations of filth, unreliability and inconvenience.
"Most people don’t even notice these phones," Pete Izzo, Jr., one of the city's last pay-phone technicians tellsMashable as he repairs a phone at 13th Street and 4th Avenue late one Thursday evening.
But what most New Yorkers don't know is that these low-tech phones have something useful hidden inside: free Wi-Fi.
The city fitted 10 phones with free Wi-Fi in 2012 as part of a pilot program. Since then, the number of Wi-Fi-enabled phones has grown modestly. New Yorkers can now find free hotspots in 35 phones operated by Izzo's employer, CBS Outdoor. However, the company says it's poised to deploy as many as 5,000 hotspots.
CBS Outdoor is one of only a handful of private entities still operating pay phones in the city, and the industry is in dire straits with plummeting revenues. There were 25,000 phones a decade ago. Today, there are less than 12,000.
Operators have plastered the remaining phones with advertising, which produced the hoped-for financial results. But it left the larger question of what to do with the phones unanswered.
Enter the Internet, or at least some part of it.
"We see this primarily as a Wi-Fi franchise," says Peter Izzo Sr., a service operations executive at CBS Outdoor. "Every new structure will have Wi-Fi capability," he added, side-stepping the term "phone."
Through sponsorship, advertising and co-location with other Wi-Fi providers, Izzo hopes to monetize wireless Internet and rescue his industry. It's a fresh take on the antiquated pay phone, filled with obvious possibilities — and less-apparent perils.
Last month, BuzzFeed revealed that phones operated by Titan were potentially tracking users through the use of Bluetooth devices called "beacons."
Following the report, Titan agreed to pull its beacons at the request of City Hall, even though some feel that the threat to privacy may have been overblown.
But even if these companies operate under better security practices, they may be unlikely to solve one major issue of free public Wi-Fi. It’s notoriously attractive to identity thieves, which could become more of a threat as the number of free Wi-Fi networks increases.
Despite the obstacles, both Izzo and his son Pete Izzo, Jr. say they are optimistic about the future of their field, whether it includes phones or not. Izzo Jr.'s repair duties now include installing and maintaing Wi-Fi modems and routers hidden in the housing of old pay phone units.
"I don't see any other infrastructure in the world that could accommodate such a connective atmosphere," Izzo says, looking at a pile of discarded phones in his company's shop.
"To bring free Wi-Fi to millions of people is gonna really change the city."
Source:
Mashable
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