New Yorkers hoping to connect to public Wi-Fi can now do so.
LinkNYC, the public Wi-Fi service available in New York City, has gone live in four locations. According to a Twitter update on the official LinkNYC account, four Wi-Fi hubs across Third Avenue in the city are now up and running as part of a beta rollout.
For the last several years, New York has been trying to figure out what to do with the now obsolete payphones that dot its landscape. Rather than simply remove them, New York in 2014 announced a plan to replace them with Wi-Fi hubs, known as Links, across all five boroughs. The idea is to provide free Wi-Fi around the location, as well as allow users to browse the Internet and charge their mobile devices when they step inside a Link.
In January, LinkNYC, which is run by the CityBridge consortium, announced that it would deploy a total of 510 Links through July, with many more coming in the ensuing months. In addition to locations around Third Avenue, CityBridge is promising to put Links in Northern Manhattan, South Bronx, and Staten Island, among other locations, in the coming months.
Until then, ride over to Third Avenue and check it out. At least some users are already saying that it's faster than their home Wi-Fi. But how it will hold up as more people jump on the network remains to be seen.