The State of Free Public Wi-Fi in New York City
This year, the Wi-Fi Alliance is celebrating 20 years of Wi-Fi. The industry association projects that the total number of Wi-Fi devices installed will surpass 13 billion this year.
For almost as long as there has been Wi-Fi, New Yorkers have been using it to connect to the internet in parks, libraries and city streets. For a long time, it was an amenity — a way to encourage people to sit and enjoy a public space. Today, free public Wi-Fi is a critical part of the City’s efforts to connect all New Yorkers with affordable, reliable broadband service and make New York the fairest big city in America.
Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City has seen more than a tripling of the number of free public Wi-Fi access points, with major improvements in connection speed, reliability and privacy protections. Today, the NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer is releasing the City’s first ever report on Public Wi-Fi in New York City, establishing service standards and coverage metrics for this critical public resource.
This report builds on our Truth in Broadband: Access and Connectivity in New York City Report, part of our mandate to provide the most complete and current picture of broadband service in New York City and to empower New Yorkers with information about the quality and availability of internet service in the City. .
The report focuses on Wi-Fi service that is available for free to the public and is divided into two main discussion sections: Coverage and Standards. The Coverage section describes a new approach to assessing the availability of free public Wi-Fi for all New Yorkers by defining “a critical mass of the City’s public spaces” and by establishing the baseline technical and policy standards that would allow for “a seamless user experience” across different Wi-Fi systems. The Standards section includes criteria that can differentiate one public Wi-Fi service from another, with the goal of making all service in New York City consistent and high quality.
The framework of this report represents the first step towards a public Wi-Fi “master plan,” to borrow a term from architecture and urban design, in that it lays out for the entire area within local government purview — public space in New York City — what kind of Wi-Fi we want to see and where we want to see it. It lays the foundation to further expand coverage, improve service, and enhance the user experience towards the goal of seamless, standardized, free Wi-Fi in a critical mass of New York City’s public spaces.
We plan to update data on free public Wi-Fi on NYC Open Data on a regular basis and will update the free public Wi-Fi standards and policies as needed.
We welcome your feedback by email at connected@cto.nyc.gov.
Joshua Breitbart — Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Broadband, in the Mayor’s Office of the CTO for the City of New York
