Pay Phone of the Future Coming to NYC

According to the Washington Post, pay phones have not gone away but are resurfacing, at least in New York City, as web-based contraptions that they're going to call CityBridge Links. The machines may look sort-of like pay phones, but the things are going to do a whole lot more than simply just let you make a phone call.

New York has assembled a number of telecom companies along with technology and advertising concerns to deploy several thousand of these modern-day pay phones across the city, and they're going to not only offer free WiFi connections, but free calls to anywhere in the U.S.. They'll have touchscreen displays with direct access to a wide range of city services including direction maps for tourists and cellphone charging stations, and you'll also be able to connect to emergency responders plus receive alerts from the city whenever there's an emergency.

Obviously it's probably been quite a while since any of us used a pay phone. But as we know, it's been part of a lot of our culture for decades - even Clark Kent changed in a few of them - and the city has been trying to figure out what to do with the spaces where the old ones have been just sitting around. 

The new CityBridge Links are going to be funded, they say, by sophisticated advertising fine-tuned to each machine's location and they're projected to generate something like $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years of operation with half of that going straight back to the city. Additional revenue will come from auctioning off most of the old pay phones. However, they do plan to keep a few of the original Superman-style phone booths for posterity.

Construction of the new network is set to begin in 2015 with as many as 10,000 machines to be installed across the city, replacing around 6,500 of the older regular pay phones. Clark Kent would be so proud!