New York City is scrapping its pay phones to create Wi-Fi hot spots

New York City is giving its pay phones a 21st-century upgrade — by turning them into high speed Wi-Fi hotspots. The free service will offer broadband speeds of 1,000 megabits a second, which is about 100 times faster than the typical speed provided by most wireless carriers, Market Watch reports. After connecting for the first time, a client's device will be able to connect automatically to the hot spots throughout the city.

Unlike their pay phone counterparts, the hot spot units stand nine and a half feet fall, with screens on either side displaying advertisements. The hot spots will also have an Android tablet available to use for either free phone calls or surfing the internet.

The service is being brought to New York via a $200 million investment from CityBridge, a collaboration between major tech companies Qualcomm Inc., CIVIQ Smartscapes, and Intersection, which is backed by Google's parent company, Alphabet. New York begins rolling the hot spots out this month, with plans to install 500 hot spots by July; eventually CityBridge aims to replace all 7,500 pay phone locations in the city.

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