Derby Mayor Hates BT’s Plan to Build Ultrafast WiFi Street Hubs

The Mayor of Derby City, Councillor Robin Wood, has criticised a planning application by BT to deploy the next generation of their smart UK Street Hub WiFi kiosks (formerly InLinkUK). According to the Mayor, the only people using phone boxes today were “either drug dealers or prostitutes,” although kiosks aren’t quite the same thing.

Just to recap. The Street Hubs are being used to replace some ageing phone boxes in busy urban areas. Each kiosk typically offers free ultrafast Wi-Fi, USB device charging, council information / services, environmental monitoring, free UK calls, the ability to boost 4G and 5G mobile signals via the inclusion of small cells and a large HD display on the side for advertising (this helps to fund the units).

On the surface this sounds great, but not everybody is convinced. A number of members on Derby City Council’s Conservation Area Committee, including Mayor Robin Wood, have openly voiced opposition to the idea (Derby Telegraph). The mayor questioned why such things were needed as people already carry mobile phones and, he added, the only people using phone boxes today were “either drug dealers or prostitutes“.

BT has previously informed ISPreview.co.uk that their ambition is to roll out more than 200 Street Hub 2.0 units to new sites across the UK by around the middle of 2022, with the City of Derby (Derbyshire, England) also being set to benefit.

Robin Wood, The Mayor of Derby City, said:

“I hate them, I think we shouldn’t have them in any conservation area. If somebody wanted to put up an advertising hoarding, which is essentially what these are, we would say no.

I really cannot see that we need these or there is any necessity for them. The only people that use phone boxes are either drug dealers or prostitutes.

I think we ought to make a firm policy that we do not allow these in conservation areas. Sorry that’s a bit strong but I don’t like them at all.”

Other committee members alleged that the kiosks might affect the setting of listed buildings, where they are in a Conservation Area, and echoed the mayor’s concerns about advertising. But BT’s planning application states that their hubs “are of a high quality, accessible design that would be a significant improvement over the existing payphones in the council’s borough. As such the council should support the proposal in the interest of the significant public benefits,” which they added would “outweigh any harm caused when weighing up all material planning considerations.”

As for the remarks about “drug dealers and prostitutes,” back in 2019 Tower Hamlets (London) became the first council in the country to temporarily stop calls from 18 of BT’s older InLinkUK kiosks in the borough after Police claimed that 20,000 calls had been made to known drug dealers in just four months. In 2020 similar claims were made against the units in Swansea (Wales) by the South Wales drugs support agency, Barod.

At the time Barod’s Service Manager, Jamie Harries, said: “We are aware that the kiosks are being used for this and other things, which is no different to the old telephone kiosks.” All of this might help to explain why the Mayor of Derby is concerned about BT’s kiosks being built.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that BT did take action over this, not least by introducing a new software algorithm to automatically detected and block “anti-social” calls, which also harnessed some insight from the police to help identify suspicious patterns and phone numbers.