FOREST HILLS — Five high-speed public Wi-Fi hotspot kiosks have recently been installed along Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills and Kew Gardens, providing free Internet access to residents, city officials said.
The kiosks have been installed near Ascan, 75th, 76th, 77th and 81st avenues, according to an online LinkNYC map. As of now these are the only Wi-Fi booths in Queens.
The city is also getting ready to begin installing the hotspots in Jamaica, officials said. The neighborhood was initially slated to get its kiosks by July as part of the first phase of the initiative which will include more than 500 kiosks throughout the city, but last week the city said that the first LinkNYC kiosks in Jamaica will be installed in September.
“Issues surrounding the deployment of new fiber in Jamaica had to be resolved before this could be done,” Maya Worman, a spokeswoman for the city Department of Information and Technology and Telecommunications said in an email.
She did not elaborate on what the issues were.
Worman also said that more kiosks will soon be placed along Queens Boulevard, “but not until after the sites currently being prepared in Jamaica are installed.”
The program has faced numerous delays, caused in part by a Verizon employees' strike earlier this year and by a lawsuit filed by Telebeam, a firm that controlled hundreds of pay phones in the city, according to published reports.
CityBridge LLC, a company which operates LinkNYC kiosks, has so far installed hundreds of the booths in Manhattan and more than a dozen in The Bronx. As of now, however, there are no kiosks in Brooklyn and Staten Island, according to the map.
Each 9.5-foot-tall kiosk, which replaces a former phone booth, provides Internet access in a 150-foot radius. Locals can also charge their phones, make free domestic phone calls to anywhere in the U.S. and use a touch-screen tablet to browse Internet, according to the city.
