How Citywide Wi-Fi Is Offering Advertisers Flexibility

With LinkNYC, New York boasts the most advanced citywide wi-fi network in North America - and advertisers are charging up.

-  Janet Stilson

On a sunny January day, a young mother strolled along West 107th Street in New York, explaining a strange phenomenon to her son. Before cellphones, there used to be these things along the sidewalks you could put a coin in and make a telephone call from, she told her bewildered child. She might as well have been describing a wringer washing machine.

By the relatively recent end of their life cycle, those pay phones dotting the New York landscape had largely been beaten into a state of dysfunction. But soon, they will be replaced by sleek, WiFi-enabled kiosks, making New York home to the most advanced citywide wireless network in North America.

This is one of a couple of dozen cities around the world edging ever closer to becoming what is known as a “smart city,” an urban location tightly connected with advanced forms of technology involving not only mobile devices and ads but sophisticated forms of healthcare, energy, transportation, property management, and waste and water systems. A city must be advanced in several of those areas in order to become a smart city, according to market research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, which projects that there will be 26 such cities worldwide by 2025. What’s more, “there will be hundreds of cities that will try and adopt one or two smart city areas over the course of the next few years,” says Archana Amarnath, a global director at the firm.