See that sleek advertising billboard? It's actually a modern day replacement for the 1960's telephone booth. Meet LinkNYC.
Each big beautiful device delivers 1 gigabit of glorious WIFI(serving hundreds of WIFI users simultaneously). To deliver this much high speed goodness, CityBridge is laying thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable).
Since it is replacing the old style phone-booth's it's only fitting that the LinkNYC station also allow anyone to make free unlimited calls to anywhere in the US thanks to a deal with Vonage. Call's can be made via the built in speaker and mic or via your own headset (plugged in) .
What if your device is dead? Are you out of luck? Not you're not. Each device has a power only USB plug which means you can use the station to charge your power-hungry smartphone or tablet.
And each device has a touch screen tablet that can be used to browser the internet or lookup city services.
There are over 200 LinkNYC stations currently deployed and more are on the way. I know some readers are freaking out. How can a city force tax-payers to subsidize something like this? Well they aren't. These kiosks are self funded through advertising and may even generate a little extra income for the city. The revenue is from advertising shown on both sides of the kiosks.
The solution is packaged by SideWalk Labs which is a wholy owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
And that my friends is how a modern tech savvy city does it. Democratizing technology while being cost neutral to the city.