BT Begin Deploying 12 Ultrafast WiFi InLinkUK Kiosks in Glasgow

After deploying in London and Leeds, BT has today announced the first roll-out of 12 InLinkUK smart kiosks in Glasgow (Scotland), which claim to offer “ultrafast” 1Gbps capable free public WiFi, free UK phone calls, USB device charging and a range of other digital services to help people in the vicinity.

The first kiosk went live on Buchanan Street and others will soon follow around the city centre. Overall a total of 150 kiosks have now been rolled out to parts of London, Leeds and Glasgow. The InLinkUK kiosks reflect a partnership between BT, Intersection (LinkNYC) and advertising company Primesight. The plan is that they will eventually replace over 1,000 pay phones in major cities across the UK. Funding for the kiosks is extracted via revenues from advertising on the large 55″ HD digital displays.

Neil Scoresby, BT’s GM for Payphones and InLinkUK, said:

“Today’s launch in Glasgow brings the fastest free public wi-fi in the UK to Scotland. Residents and visitors alike are set to benefit from this new state-of-the-art ‘phone box’, where they can also make calls for free, access local information and even charge their ‘phone when out and about.”

Unfortunately BT has not provided any evidence to substantiate their claim of offering the “fastest free public wi-fi in the UK” (difficult to prove). Some speed testing conducted last year (here) unsurprisingly revealed that real-world performance actually came in well below the headline claims of ‘up to’ 1Gbps (sub-100Mbps is a more viable expectation).

Wireless broadband signals and network congestion are of course notoriously difficult things to tackle in a real-world environment but this shouldn’t overshadow the fact that BT’s kiosks still offer a useful set of features. The real speeds may struggle to hit a Gigabit but they’re still impressively fast for a free public WiFi hotspot.

Since the first InLink was installed in June last year, more than 100,000 people have subscribed to the service’s free wi-fi, using “enough data to download the equivalent of over 12 million songs.” The InLinks have also “saved users more than £352,000 in free calls, with 33,000 calls being made on average every week.”

UPDATE 1:09pm

We understand that planning consent for more kiosks has already been approved by local councils in Birmingham, Newcastle, Southampton, Gateshead and Sheffield, as well as the London borough of Kensington & Chelsea.