TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Verizon Pulling Plug on Free NYC Wi-Fi

Re: Verizon Pulling Plug on Free NYC Wi-Fi

Danny Burstein (dannyb@panix.com)
Sun, 1 May 2005 22:34:45 UTC

In <telecom24.191.6@telecom-digest.org> Lisa Minter
<lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> writes:

> Anyone know what the reasoning was on this?

> http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050430/ap_on_hi_te/verizon_nyc_wi_fi

Verizon, as a promotional tool for their landline DSL service, set up
a hundred or so (they announced more...) of their payphones with WIFI
(wireless interent/802.11) internet access.

If you had a _paid_ DSL account with them, your username/password
worked with these as well. And typically they were good for 100 or so
feet down the block pretty reliably. Quite handy for some folk.

But they've lately decided that the costs of maintining that network
(small, but real) weren't getting them enough additional customers for
their landline DSL service to warrant continuing it. And... they've
also got numerous flavors now of region-wide paid internet wireless
service, so they've decided to shut down the (kind-of) freebie.

And to confuse things more, the NYC franchise and taxing authorities
were looking at ways of charging VZ additional fees for the payphone
locations that were used as base stations.

I know some people who used it quite a bit, but the numbers just
weren't there for the VZ budget folk.

(Again, this wasn't "free". You got it as a no-cost add-on when you
had a paid landline dsl account).

_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

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