24 October 2018

Swansea has become the first Welsh city to benefit from the free InLinkUK service from BT.

The first 11 InLink kiosks have been installed in and around the city centre and will provide ultrafast Wi-Fi speeds of up to 1Gbps. They also provide free phone calls to UK landlines and mobiles, rapid mobile device charging, the BT Phone Book app, as well as easy access to charity helplines.

Swansea Council leader Rob Stewart with one of the city’s new InLink kiosks. They will support both Welsh and English, with the main screens showcasing dual language community information at launch and the interactive tablet to follow shortly.

BT first unveiled its InLink service last year (see News, March 2017). The telco says the kiosks mean more space on pavements as, on average, each InLink replaces two BT payphones. Around 24 payphones are set to be removed from Swansea after being replaced by 12 InLinks. BT’s red phone boxes will remain.

At the end of August, BT said the first of the fully-accessible InLinks had recently gone live on Princess Way and Castle Street, with further activations expected in the coming weeks. The new InLinks will support both Welsh and English languages, with the main larger screens showcasing dual language community information at launch, and the smaller interactive tablet to follow shortly.

The UK rollout has so far seen more than 200 InLink kiosks installed in Leeds, Gateshead, Glasgow, Southampton, Newcastle, Sheffield, as well as eight London boroughs. BT plans to install hundreds more in key towns and cities across the UK.

The company adds that since the first InLink was launched in June last year, more than 148,000 people have subscribed to the service’s free Wi-Fi, using enough data to download the equivalent of more than 27 million songs. BT says the kiosks have also saved people more than £660,000 in free calls, with 50,000 calls being made on average every week across the country.