Can a smart city free us from the tyranny of the cable companies? When we tested the new LinkNYC hotspots here in New York, their blinding speed and 200-foot range made them start to look not just like hotspots for passing tourists, but like an actual municipal Internet service provider—something that would probably cause Time Warner Cable and Verizon to worry.
"We actually had a joke of people setting up their living rooms right next to it," said Kiva Allgood, Qualcomm's VP of smart cities. The LinkNYCs are part of a broader "smart city" strategy from Qualcomm, which has been working in other cities on gunshot spotters, smart water metering, and even smart trash cans that tell sanitation departments when to pick up the trash.
The LinkNYC poles run Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processors, like midrange smartphones, and hook into their own municipal fiber network under the streets. They then pump out Wi-Fi using Qualcomm Vive 802.11ac access points with multi-user MIMO, which helps them get the epic range we saw in our tests.
"It's purpose-built fiber," Allgood said. "The city owns the network. Municipal gigabit fiber under the streets."
The hotspots are designed to mesh together, Allgood said, so as you walk between access points you'll keep one session ID and won't have to log in again. And use will be unlimited: "we do not have any intentions of metering or fettering people on our network," she said. (We'll see if they stick to that tune once LinkNYC users discover BitTorrent.)
So here's where things get...a little mysterious. The city and Qualcomm don't want to be seen necessarily as interfering in the businesses of commercial ISPs. But they can't deny that they're beaming free Wi-Fi into people's apartment buildings, all over the city.
"Our goal is that this is a city service, on the corner, that people could leverage instead of having to go to the library," Allgood said. "That will work for the first two floors of a building but not seven others. Our goal is to give them access. If they can do that from their living room, it's just because they happen to be in the right place."
LinkNYC will only get more pervasive, as Qualcomm plans to equip up to 10,000 of the poles across the city. It's also looking into putting public Wi-Fi into New York's "big belly" smart trash cans.
If LinkNYC succeeds, it could show the way for more cities to combine a citywide municipal Wi-Fi plan with their less visible smart city efficiency initiatives. That means it's worth keeping an eye on this project, even if you never set foot in New York.
"If you think about the growth in cities and where we're going, cities and their infrastructure are going to have to adapt and do things differently," Allgood said.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.