Fun Maps: How Connected Will Your Neighborhood Be With LinkNYC Pay Phone Consoles?

Following last week’s announcement that New York City’s pay phones would be converted into high speed WiFi consoles, Ben Wellington from I Quant NY created more of his fun maps analyzing the WiFi coverage of the pay phone consoles.

Each pay phone wil have a WiFi radius of 150 feet and the city has currently approximately 6,000 pay phones with a plans to add 1,600 more consoles.

Wellington also analyzed which neighborhoods had the best percentage coverage from the new network plan, concluding that Manhattan had the best coverage, with Kips Bay topping the neighborhood rankings. The first 38 neighborhoods on the list are all in Manhattan, with Downtown Brooklyn coming in at #39 with just 16% coverage and Ridgewood at #40 with 15% coverage.

Writes Wellington:

If these kiosks are mainly aiming to help tourists, there are some notable tourist destinations that could use a boost.  Battery Park has only 12% coverage from 14 phones.  Central Park fares the worst in Manhattan, with less than 1% coverage from only 7 phones in the whole park. In Brooklyn, one up-and-coming tourist destination fairs particularly poorly: Red Hood with only 0.2% coverage from a single phone.

If they are hoping to offer internet for lower income communities with this program, once again Red Hook notably scores pretty poorly.  Cypress Hills gets 1% in Brooklyn, and Windsor Terrace has a single phone providing < 1% coverage. In fact there were 50 neighborhoods with out any phones in the list, giving 0% coverage.  Those might be a good place to start when placing additional units.

See more in our Fun Maps column and read more about the LinkNYC WiFi console program here.