Verizon is scaling back their plans to convert a thousand New York City pay phones into WiFi hotspots by the end of the year, cutting their target back to just 500. The reason, they say, is that coverage will be good enough with only 500 hotspots, something which is hard to believe. They’ve probably found that it’s costing more than they thought it would, and besides, they probably want to focus on building a customer base for their high-speed EV-DO cellular network which would more or less be in competition with WiFi hotspots. [Gizmodo]