Verizon, as a promotional tool for their landline DSL service, set up a hundred or so (they announced more...) of their payphones with WIFI (wireless interent/802.11) internet access.
If you had a _paid_ DSL account with them, your username/password worked with these as well. And typically they were good for 100 or so feet down the block pretty reliably. Quite handy for some folk.
But they've lately decided that the costs of maintining that network (small, but real) weren't getting them enough additional customers for their landline DSL service to warrant continuing it. And... they've also got numerous flavors now of region-wide paid internet wireless service, so they've decided to shut down the (kind-of) freebie.
And to confuse things more, the NYC franchise and taxing authorities were looking at ways of charging VZ additional fees for the payphone locations that were used as base stations.
I know some people who used it quite a bit, but the numbers just weren't there for the VZ budget folk.
(Again, this wasn't "free". You got it as a no-cost add-on when you had a paid landline dsl account).
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