New York City’s Link5G Towers Don’t Have 5G Yet

Remember those looming Link5G towers that everyone loves to fight about? Perhaps you’re staring up at one on your block right now. Well, it looks like they’re not even providing 5G service, according to a recent report by Gothamist. Only two out of the almost 200 towers that have gone up around the city in the past two years have 5G equipment installed inside at all. (Conspiracy theorists, rejoice!) Still, some 2,000 more are planned to go up.

The 32-foot-tall gray towers are built by CityBridge, the tech company that also installed the smaller LinkNYC kiosks that flash ads, provide free Wi-Fi, and charge cell phones and other devices. The towers are meant to offer free high-speed connectivity in low-income neighborhoods that lack access to it. But so far, only one telecommunication carrier is leasing space in the towers (and in just two of them, at that). Experts told Gothamist that this is partly because the industry is retreating from 5G as a whole. “Building those on spec seems kind of pointless, or risky at least,” Henning Schulzrinne, a professor of engineering and computer science at Columbia University, said.

Still, Margaux Knee, the chief administrative officer for LinkNYC, argued to Gothamist that the towers can be used to store any new technology, even if carriers back away from 5G. CityBridge officials also promise that another telecom company will sign on “very soon.” In the meantime, the towers offer the services that the smaller LinkNYC kiosks provide — free Wi-Fi, a place to charge your phone, and a tablet to look up directions and make calls.

So it looks like they’re not going anywhere. Over the past few years, a number of preservationists and community boards have tried to stop their installation, calling them hideous and a blight on historic districts. As landscape architect Signe Nielsen once told us, “I think it’s going to be about the ugliest thing in our streetscape that you can possibly imagine.” A few of these campaigns have been successful, like the one waged by the residents of Carnegie Hill, on the Upper East Side, which now has only one of these towers. For the rest of us, knowing the massive gray poles are mostly empty cabinets will just be one more piece of information that haunts us.