New York City will begin this month replacing thousands of pay phones with free Wi-Fi hot spots

The lowly pay phone is getting a high-tech makeover, a change that aims to challenge the speeds and high prices charged by wireless carriers.

New York City will begin this month replacing thousands of pay phones with free Wi-Fi hot spots. The city expects to have 500 hot spots installed by July, and eventually about 7,500 units will be replaced.

The hot spots will sit atop a 9.5-foot tall box with electronic screens on each side to display advertising. Sandwiched between the sidewalk ads will be an Android tablet that can be used to place free phone calls and surf the Web.

The advertising-supported project, called LinkNYC, is being run by CityBridge, a joint venture between three tech companies: smartphone chip maker Qualcomm Inc.,networking company CIVIQ Smartscapes and Intersection, which has backing from Google parent company Alphabet Inc. CityBridge says it is investing more than $200 million in the project.

Many cities have tried installing free public Wi-Fi, but it often didn’t work well enough to draw many users because speeds were slow or the experience was bogged down by requiring users to watch an ad before connecting

CityBridge says its Wi-Fi will deliver broadband speeds of 1,000 megabits a second, about 100 times typical speeds provided by wireless carriers. Users won’t be forced to sit through ads on their mobile devices to log on and devices will connect automatically after a user signs in the first time.

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