Payphones are becoming less and less common these days thanks to the popularity of mobile phones so what’s a phone company to do with their old network of payphone locations? Why, turn them into WiFi Hotspots of course!
broadband News ۻ Recycling the Payphone - The migration to Wi-Fi hotspots...
With mobile phones making the payphone less relevant, many telcos are considering using many old payphone mounts as Wi-Fi access points. Verizon recently launched their Wi-Fi plan for NYC, and intends to refit many old payhones as hotspots to help with coverage in Manhattan. British Telecom last week announced the company would be doing the same thing to 200 payphones across the UK, as part of their push to have 4,000 Wi-Fi access points available by next summer. Bell Canada was the first telco to begin tinkering with the idea, mounting Cisco AP1200’s in steel protective boxes alongside Alcatel ADSL modems with a 3Mb/Sec ADSL/ATM backhaul to the internet.
Looks like that investment I made in a wireless home network and card for my laptop could prove more useful than I first thought.
Posted on 09/23/2003 at 09:28 AM 
Amazing. I went to Verizon’s site and they say WiFi is free for current Verizon Online customers; DSL or dial-up! DSL looks like it’s about $35 a month and dial-up is about $22. I find this hard to comprehend…a new technology is introduced and they aren’t fleecing us for it? I don’t reckon we peasants out here in the “provinces” will be seeing WiFi for a while.