I preface this by admitting I am very late to the game - I have seemingly had my head buried in the sand as all of the LinkNYC stations went up around the city. It is not that I was not aware of them - they are nearly impossible to miss, with their digital ad displays, tablets (occasionally flashing explicit material…), and dubious looking plugs. I had not asked “why” though - and so here is what I found after a little digging.
There are 2308 of the hubs erected around the city, with 53% of them being located in Manhattan. There is sort of a patchwork distribution of them scattered around the 5 boroughs, with some heavy concentrations in the familiar areas.
Across the whole city, only 20% of census tracts have 1, while some (like in Red Hook or near Times Square) have many. In general, after removing a few outliers and controlling for population density, the distribution looks fairly reasonable.
How many would be needed to completely tile the city?
Each unit has an optimal range of about 150 ft and a maximum range of 400 ft. So assuming the units were optimally distributed, how many would it take to tile the whole city? 2308 seems like a lot, however it would actually require up to 119k of them to completely cover the city. Enter the the 5g variants of the towers, which have a range of 750 ft - we would only need 4740 of those to tile the city (ignoring for a second the difficulty those little 5g waves have in actually reaching people).
Internet for All
One of the objectives of the program was to provide internet to the least advantaged residents of NYC. The 5g program in particular seems to be targeting that - the 262 5g towers that have been built so far are generally distributed towards lower household income areas (on average, areas with 5g towers have 23% lower median income than standard towers).
Who Pays for this?
Advertisers! In fact, NYC appears to get a kickback from the program. In 2024 NYC booked $5.8M in revenue from the program, thanks in part to its contract to harvest 5% revenue LinkNYC makes from operating the digitial ad displays. Revenue is also harvested from leasing the 5g tower space to 3rd party carriers. Of course, this is all a little far off the astronomical initial projections, which was supposed to generate $500M over 12 years, but the deal was restructured in 2021 and appears to be smooth sailing now. Not bad for a municipal project!
What did we lose?
Phone Booths. The LinkNYC stations originated from a De Blasio program to replace the aging phone booths around the city. And it was successful in that - in 2022 the last phone booth was removed from 49th street and 7th ave. I suppose I am waiting now for Hollywood to do a reboot of Phone Booth centered around the LinkNYC stations.
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