The tremendous ambitions behind New York City’s free WiFi - The Washington Post

Interesting times ahead for AT&T, Verizon, and other Internet service providers

"This public connectivity could someday wind up supplementing — if not replacing — some New Yorkers' existing Internet subscriptions, said Intersection's chief innovation officer, Colin O'Donnell. Instead of browsing the Web through your home WiFi or 4G LTE, just pop onto the nearest Link's WiFi signal.

"You could put 20 bucks back in your pocket" in mobile data savings that way, said O'Donnell. "If you did that for 20 percent of New Yorkers, that's like, a quarter-billion dollars a year you're putting back in people's pockets."

If that sounds ambitious, you should hear O'Donnell sketch out the broader vision for LinkNYC, which New York officially unveiled in February along with Qualcomm and CIVIQ Smartscapes. (An notable investor in the project is Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the company that owns Google.)"

The tremendous ambitions behind New York City’s free WiFi - The Washington Post