Last week, the city government unveiled a model of a futuristic payphone, to be deployed through the city starting late 2015. The system includes built-in Wi-Fi hotspots with speeds between 100 megabytes and 1 gigabyte per second. Labeled LinkNYC, the public-private partnership project aims to link communities and help to bridge the digital divide.
Public-private partnerships with similar missions have been around in the city, including Brooklyn, for a while. How are the older projects faring?
People walking across the Fulton Street Mall in Downtown Brooklyn get access to around 10 mbps of free Internet via Wi-Fi. The initiative was part of the Wireless Corridor Challenge announced in 2013 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
TheWireless Corridor Challenge is a public-private partnership that aims to bring Wi-Fi connectivity to selected areas in the city. Under the partnership, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) teamed up with five nonprofit and corporate entities to bring Internet services in these areas. According to the contract between these companies and the corporation, they are obligated to provide free public Wi-Fi from January 2014 to December 2016. Three of the five companies have been working towards making Brooklyn more connected.
The biggest chunk of the contract in Brooklyn has been undertaken by The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, in collaboration with Fon, a Madrid-based company known for its crowdsourcing approach to Wi-Fi. Fon’s project received around $150,000 from the city, an amount that is sufficient to just host the broadband line, according to Carlton Bennett, VP of Strategy & Business Development at Fon US. Other components of the project have been funded by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Fon.
According to Bennett, these other expenses included the cost of the access points, which are made of Ruckus branded equipment and transmit the wireless signals in the area; as well as installation of the access points; branding and user experience for the login screen; the cost of setting up a back end; and maintenance costs. “There is a lot that goes into it. So therefore it is really tough for one organization, let alone a nonprofit like the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership to themselves create the infrastructure. It really takes an array of partners who are looking to take some value out of it to really fund the model,” said Bennett.
According to the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, the team has installed around 80 access points in the Downtown Brooklyn Area with a vision of 30 more to be installed in the next eight weeks.
On a Saturday evening, a walk down the coverage area can fetch you a downlink between 5 to 9 mbps—and an uplink of up to 10 mbps. Neither speed is a lightening fast number, but sufficient for your regular web browsing. After all, people won’t be downloading movies on public Wi-Fi.
Another link in the Wireless Corridor Challenge’s Brooklyn chapter is the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). BAM’s Wi-Fi network spans 1.2 miles along Fulton Street in Brooklyn from Rockwell Place to Classon Avenue and the BAM Cultural District. It was set up in partnership with Fulton Area Business (FAB) Alliance. According to a BAM spokesperson, “FAB was instrumental in planning the network, strategizing the program, and connecting BAM with participating property owners.”
The organization has put up 27 access points in the BAM cultural district with the hope of adding more in coming weeks. You can get a downlink of about 6 mbps and an uplink of 1 mbps in the BAM coverage area. These numbers though lower than the ones from Downtown Brooklyn, are sufficient for routine mail and social networks.
The most controversial key player in the Wireless Corridor contract has been Gowex, a Madrid-based Internet company that went bankrupt earlier this year. After the bankruptcy, most of the company’s hot spots, which had been spread across different boroughs, were declared non-operational. Eight of them were located in Brownsville. But according to Ian Fried, a spokesperson for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, four of the Gowex hotspots are still functional. “We are continuing to work on finding a solution that will minimize disruption to the Wireless Corridors, and we remain committed to continuing to bring wireless access to people in all five boroughs,” said Fried.
The NYCEDC’s website still states that “The Wireless Corridor Challenge networks will launch in December 2013, with continued expansion through early 2014.” We are, of course, moving toward the end of the 2014, and the first phase of installation still continues.
When it comes to Brooklyn receiving Wi-Fi, the city is either somewhat behind schedule as in the case of Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Brooklyn Academy of Music or has reduced access due to Gowex’s bankruptcy.
As apparent from historical evidence, the onus what the current state of these projects demonstrate is that the fate of our futuristic high-end public Internet project can largely depend on the private partners involved. The new LinkNYC project’s partners include Titan, Qualcomm, Inc., Control Group and Comark.
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