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NYT on Cell Phone Tower Controversy
prostoalex writes "The New York Times discusses the controversy of placing cell phone towers on top of hills, a practice to which many people object. According to the article, people frequently complain about the visual impediment and are afraid that property values will decline or some health damage will be done with radio waves. At the same time, people get quite irritated when proper phone service is not provided by the operators, and the calls keep dropping or coverage is poor outside of densely populated areas. Phone companies also lease the land to place the cell phone tower for $30,000-$50,000, which is attractive to many landowners, but some, like Sammy Barsa from NYT article, find themselves persona non grata in the community."
Fro $50k / hill / month, I'll be happy to play the role of persona non grata.
As someone who has had a cell phone tower on their property, I think it's a pretty sweet deal. And they aren't really that intrusive anymore, some designs are actually rather low profile, of course those are only meant for rural town coverage, but it's still not so bad.
And the 28,000 we recieve a year is as much as the income of a low-income family.
Please, try not to sound so stupid...
That way no one can see them from afar ;)
Wind farms are seen the same.
Its an expansion of the technological lifestyle, and a shift away from the purity of nature.
I'm all for people reusing industrial/hidden rundown areas for these eyesores, and prefer to keep the countryside views clear.
liqbase
It's a sweet deal if you happen to own a piece of land that a phone company wants to use for a tower. For whatever reason, they prefer to lease land rather than buy, and they pay pretty well for the priveledge of doing this. My mother has such a piece of land, and it nets her around $1000/month last I heard.
What really makes the deal sweet though is that the amount of land taken up by the tower is really small, and you're free to do anything else on the land that you want. I suppose what they're really leasing from you is the privlege to put a tower on your property.
In my mother's case it's a rental property with a fair amount of land, and the tower sits back far from the house. So it doesn't really interfere with the tennants lives, and it basically gives her money-for-nothing every month.
For $50k a month, I'd be happy to host a cell tower on my head.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Not In My Back Yard for...
Cell phone towers
Windmill farms
Nuclear power plants
People would love the benefits of all three, but only if they're nowhere to be seen, or in the case of the nuke plants, just far, far away.
I hope for karmic retribution for these people.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
"but some, like Sammy Barsa from NYT article, find themselves persona non grata in the community."
That's easy to fix. If anybody complains, threaten to turn up the power!
"Derp de derp."
I know cell phone towers are becoming a bane for us amateur astronomers. They are even sprouting up in remote dark sites that were once safe havens from light pollution. At a minimum if the towers would use red instead of white light the problem wouldn't be as bad.
Ok, lets just get ONE THING F*ING CLEAR:
Radiation is not like other everyday occurances, either radiation ionizes your molecules/atoms, or it dosen't. It's not like pushing a car down the road, where you will get thre no matter what, its just a mater of time, no. It's more like pushing a car up a hill, either your strong enough, or not.
Thats is why lab rats get cancer, or other assorted forms of doom, when they are exposed to "Cell phone like radiation", they get a higher dose to 'accelerate' (change the outcome of, whatever) the experiment. If they were given the dose that you recieve from standing a few hundred feet from a tower, or holding a cell phone an inch or so from your brain the rats would have jack.
Do some research, folks. Better yet, how bout the media do a bit of reporting! Tell folks what I just did, DUMB IT DOWN, make peoiple understand that unless the tests are fair, they mean SQUAT.
Sorry for all the shouting. False science makes me angry. You should hear me in my programing class.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
There's a radio tower next to a highway near where I live. Whoever built it decided to put some branches and some needles on it to make it look like a tree.
You can tell it's a radio tower. It's the one tree that's twice as tall as all of the other trees, plus it looks fake. If anything, it's more of an eyesore.
The visual blight caused by regular phone poles and electrical poles is far worse than for cel towers. Why do people accept regular phone poles but make such a fuss over cel towers? Regular phone poles are much more dangerous as well - consider the number of people who are hurt or killed when they hit them with cars...
Surely just painting them light blue or white to suit the sky would make them half dissapear. Cheap and easy solution for a non problem.
Oh, and for the record- our TV reception SUCKS.
Here in Coral Gables, Florida (The City Beautiful) there are quite a few cellphone towers disguised as trees. http://www.fraudfrond.com/
Alright! I know I'm in there! If I don't come out, I'll have to come in after me!
There are no trees in NY.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
In Australia, they've started renting space in church steeples. They make the antennae very unobtrusive, and their RF and SONET gear doesn't take up much space. Pumps quite a bit of money into churches that can be used for community projects, aid, missions, etc.
A company named Larson has done exactly as you suggest for lots of different towers.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Where I go to college, there is a cellphone antenna array on the top of the tallest building - but you will have to really know what you are looking for to find it... its hidden in a work of art - and looks like part of the building!
Very well hid.
Maybe they should send some of their people to Disney to work in some of the theme parks to discover how Disney makes art. They are damn good at making one thing look like something else. And making it look good.
Even the cable company around here is finally getting into the act and now installing the aboveground workings of their neighborhood distribution electronics in faux fiberglass boulders which blend in with the decor of the neighborhood... those ugly green "breadboxes" they had were an eyesore, graffittied on, and often kicked in disgust. Nobody wanted that ugly thing gracing their front yard.
The thing looked as out of place as an abandoned old car battery.
They need to hire some artists... and use a little creativity so they don't create neighborhood eyesores.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
That you no longer have property rights to do what you please with your property you own. You can't build without a permit, you can't build without getting your plans ok'ed by local zoning boards. You can't develop on your land if it isn't zoned right.
The one thing that retains best value in America and you can't do what you please with it when you own it. Property rights are the biggest thing for a free society, without them you have nothing.
If you had proper property rights for land you own you wouldn't need the EPA becuase you could sue those big companies that polute your land and get the proper restitution for them destroying your land. But perversions in propery rights have made people dependent on the State to receive alimony for damages.
In my town there are two cell sites (although I still can't get service at my house, so for some reason Verizon Wireless doesn't seem to use these towers, but that's beside the point). One is hidden away in the town church's steeple, which is nice because it gets the church money that it needs and also provides cell service without an eyesore. The other is disguised as a giant (and I mean giant) flagpole next to the main highway. So both provide service (or so I'm told) without making the eyesore of a traditional tower.
There's some spammy/spyware like "iWon" thing wrapped in that link. It places a little "iWon" banner at the top of the NYT page, which of course links to some bullshit "iWon" page, which of course probably makes our friend prostoalex a bunch of money.
r s.html?
I'm not sure what else it does as I'm running OmniWeb on my Mac, but Windows users beware.
Clean link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/business/01towe
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Now an eye-sore, it still can be.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
I don't know about elsewhere, but the fake-tree cell phone towers in New York look awful. Yes, we do have real trees, and no, this doesn't look like a tree. It looks like a fucking cell phone tower with a few tiny fake branches at the top. Is it so hard to make it look a little more realistic?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
More agenda-setting, just like with Augusta and the Masters not allowing women members. Only a "controversy" because the NYT ran 100 piece on it.
Yawn.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
or some health damage will be done with radio waves.
The one time wearing a tin foil hat would be optimal...
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
But...but...doesn't a tree grow in Brooklyn?
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As Apple has shown time and again, style is a key objective of engineering in creating a desireable product. Building an aesthetically pleasing cell tower would do an end-run around most (tho by no means all) of the objections.
A huge metal eyesore makes it harder for the product to be deployed. Disguising, blending or beautifying the towers to compliment their surroundings would make them easier to deploy. For example, in New England, many cell towers are hidden atop the towering smokestacks of 18th and 19th century mills (no longer used, but are pleasing brickwork architecture the building owners usually left in place.) They also lease space in tall church steeples... another commodity New England has in abundance.
Where no steeples or smokestacks are available, companies should design a nice cladding that compliments the surroundings.
Hire a real architecht with serious artistic chops to oversee the design and implementation of cell towers, and you spend a lot less money fighting hostile communities. Not hard to figure out.
SoupIsGood Food
I've always thought many/most towers could be made to look like a work of art. If the skyline is going to be invaded, might as well make it interesting. Think of creative spires. Probably could even be designed with light materials and retrofitted to many existing towers.
Heck, maybe somone is already doing it.
Heck, the non-camoflauged towers make the NJ landscape look BETTER.
They could make it look like an endagered kind of tree, and put a fake green party member up there defending it.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
In my area, the cell "towers" are just antennas bolted to the side of already-hideous water towers or even disguised as a freakishly enormous flag pole. The flag pole is at a major intersection in the next town. It's more huge than you would ever expect to see in a town the size of Harwich, MA. But still, it could be a lot worse. The technology these days does make it possible to conceal these things. I doubt it's that much more expensive to do it like this. In the case of the water tower, it's probably quite a bit cheaper since they don't have to build the tower. Plus the money goes right to the town. I wonder why it's not more common.
I guess it's a mixed bag. The NIMBYs that throw a fit when someone wants to put up a cell tower are the same morons that are freaking out about the Wind Farm project in Nantucket Sound. It's free, clean energy and our oil addiction is destroying us.
I'm pretty off-topic here. Sorry.
I've lived under a cell phone tower my whole life and I've never had any health probbbb3839q9328!#!)NO CARRIER
It used to be said that everybody wants to be 5 minutes from an airport, but nobody wants to have an airport in their area. The public is stupid.
Phone Customer: The reception in my area is poor
Phone support: Yes, that is because we have no transmitters in your area.
Phone Customer: Why not? I deserve to have good reception, I pay my bills
Phone support: We had planned to build one last year at the request of people in your area, but people in your area protested and the plan was scrapped. So, what do you want?
Phone Customer: I want perfect reception in the middle of nowhere, with not a tower to be seen.
Phone support: have a nice day.
I think that about sums it up.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
In England, they have a practice of disguising cel phone antennae in a variety of creative ways, for example, with a fiberglass stone facade to blend in with a church's spires.
Why can't they do this in the US? For that matter, why not just attach a cel phone antenna to the top of a tall, already existing tree? Unless there's major hurricanes or tornadoes to knock one over (a condition which would effect a tower mounted antenna as well), you wouldn't see them, except for fall (unless you bolt them to conifers).
If you use the preexisting tree scenario, you save millions if not more, because you aren't wasting money on constructing towers out of steel. In fact, with that scenario, you can built antennae on mountains, etc, as far as you want. The added benefit is, of course, conservation, because the more trees standing around your antenna, the more relocation options you have for virtually zero cost.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Here's some free clue, lemming: any kind of electromagnetic radiation is made of photons. Yes, exactly what goes for visible light, goes for any other wavelength.
There is no such bullshit threshold where above X watt it's ionizing, under X watt it's not ionizing. If a single photon can cause a transition in an atom or mollecule, it will. That's the only either-or condition.
Pumping more watts, i.e., more of those photons per second, doesn't change that. There is no such thing as needing 100 photons to cause a transition. Either _one_ causes it, or any amount doesn't.
I.e., if something happens at 100W, it happens just as well at 1 milli-Watt or even 1 micro-Watt. You just have more or less of those ionized atoms, depending on the power. That's all.
I.e., those tests _are_ fair, and they're done by people who actually understand what's happening there.
"False science makes me angry."
Well, then do us all a favour and stop spouting bullshit about stuff you don't have any clue about. Actually read a physics book instead of making your own pseudo-science bullshit.
And no, just because you're the latest nerd in a CS university does _not_ make you an expert in everything on Earth. For starters, as you just proved, it doesn't mean jack squat about knowing any physics.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I propose that a NIMBY database be developed for any one who signs or protests or what ever cell phone or radio services towers of any sort.
Then when they try to get cellular service, they are DENIED flat out. "Sorry, your a NIMBY, we don't offer service to NIMBY's!"
If they have servce now it should be terminated with one of those curt legal letters they send out. Should specifically outline you a NIMBY jerk and your service has been terminated. Don't bother with the other carriers, we told them too! They don't want you either! Go AWAY!
Just like the article states they want ALL the services but don't want to support it. Too bad.
Cellular services need towers. Done.
1311393600 - Back to Black
Let's just say that if you are _the_ black sheep of the village, not to mention the one that lowered their house value by maybe $1000 with that tower... you better have _very_ thick skin. Because it'll make life as a nerd in high school seem pleasant and respectful by comparison.
Anyone thinking that large numbers of people can act like sheep, haven't seen what _small_ numbers of people can do. Your social acceptance or becoming the public enemy can depend on conforming to the local "fashions" in every step you make, every breath you take.
If it's fashionable to hate Mr John Doe for _anything_ whatsoever, people _will_ do it, just to conform to the "community".
E.g., if it's because Mr John Doe built a big mast, and supposedly shaved a couple of cents of someone's property value in the process, even those who _haven't_ lost anything in the process will turn against Mr John Doe. Heck, even people who _gained_ something in the process will do it, just to be on the fashionable and socially acceptable side of the debate.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
An RF engineer knows that lower power from the tower doesn't have anything to do with lower power from the phone. Towers are kept CLOSE TOGETHER to lower the required power output from the phone. It just so happens that having towers close together lowers the amount of power they need to emit in order to reach the phones. In fact, it would be a more accurate statement to say that towers emit lower power because the phones emit lower power, not the other way around. There's no point in having high power at the towers because the phones aren't powerful enough to reach back from that great a distance.
What does the length of a mouse have to do with the effects of non-ionizing radiation on it? Are you supposing that the mouse forms some kind of resonant dielectric cavity or something? This is quite preposterous given that a mouse is far from homogeneous, and even farther from resonant. The Q of a mouse is so incredibly low that it is unlikely in the extreme that there would be any resonance to speak of.
This is something that the medical community doesn't even understand. RF is non-ionizing, so it does not cause damage at the molecular or cellular level. The only effect of non-ionizing incident radiation is heat. That's it. Heat does not cause cancer.
Pine needles? You've got to be kidding me. Reception is poor in forests because of absorption and scattering, not because pine needles are somehow resonant.
Why would you advise someone not to hug a cell phone tower? The tower itself is not the radiating element, at least it had better not be.
Are you REALLY an RF engineer?
I've been there too. I work with the guy who leases water tower space to Verizon, T-Mobil, Nextel, et al...
I'm also a ham radio enthusiast. It used to be that neighbors didn't care if you put a TV antenna on your roof. It used to be that neighbors didn't care that you had a few wire antennas strung out in your back yard.
Now all that's changed. Thanks to the ignorance of a few empowered art school students who know nothing about either radio, economics, or even public safety (yes, these idiots even balk at the need for police radio antennas), putting up an antenna is nearly impossible. However, should I have wanted to erect a pole of the same size for a flag or even an anemometer --they wouldn't care. I think this has to do with unfortunate choice of words we electrical engineers use to describe antenna performance: Radiation. It scares the art students.
This is the victory of foolish romantics over common sense. I wish these self appointed aesthetics police could learn the true depth of their arrogant stupidity --but they're too far gone for that to happen.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
You know, I like that.
From now on, instead of calling those who object to antennas "luddites" I'll call them art students. Wonderful euphemism.
Our family has owned since the 1920s, and I am currently living on a piece of land that is one of the highest points in Baltimore County. As a ham radio operator, this situation has obvious advantages, as undoubtedly it would if I would put up a communications tower. About 10 years ago, Verizon selected a tower site about 1/4 mile away at the local Volunteer Fire Department, which sits at least 60 feet lower than where my house now stands. For the privlege of having to erect 60 foot more tower than they needed to get the same coverage, they pay the local VFD about $15,000 a year. Good for the fire dept and community relations, but from an engineering perspective it is not the best location.
Though my neighbors might think otherwise, I wouldn't mind having a 150 foot tall steel lightning rod nearby on a couple of acres that are just hayfield right now (I have had 3 damaging strikes in the last 2 years). I also wouldn't mind getting a piece of the cell company's largess that they seem to be handing out so freely to site owners.
Putting transponders on hilltops, high-tension towers, water tanks and so on makes practical sense, but I see many cell sites around here chosen for political reasons rather than engineering ones.
Well, there's the longstanding legal doctrine of 'nuisance,' which (if I recall correctly) is "a non-trespassory invasion into the right of quiet enjoyment of one's property." The idea is that if what you're putting up causes the property values around you to diminish by more than the value of what you put up, then either (a) you won't be allowed to do it, or (b) you'll be forced to pay all those people for their harm.
There's an old English case about a 19th century train that runs next to a farmer's flax field. The train emits sparks which could set the field on fire. Do you give the farmer to right to tell the train not to run, or do you allow the train to tell the farmer not to plant? In theory, it doesn't matter: If you give the right to the farmer and the train running has more value than the farmer's crop, then the train company will just pay the farmer for the right to emit sparks, and vice-versa.
The problem comes when there are 1000 different farmers: at this point, it does matter who gets the right, since it's much too difficult to deal with that many farmers. In this case, the government somehow has to figure out which option has the highest value, because the market is too convoluted to do it.
To me, that appears to be exactly what's going on with cell towers -- the value of nationwide cell-phone coverage is worth more than the drop in value of property around the towers.
Having been a leasing and zoning consultant on cell towers a while ago, here are some factoids:
- The fake tree approach is made difficult by the fact that the towers need to be extremely stiff. The antennas are tuned to radiate very precise flat lobes with minimal back/up/down-scatter. Even a bit of flex ruins the pattern. That's why the flagpoles and trees look so ungainly and out-of-proportion.
- Camouflage - fake trees, fake flagpoles, fake chimneys, etc. - are ungodly expensive. You can make a fake chimney, but it has to be out of fiberglass sculpted to match the building. There can be no internal metal frame which would block the signal, and even sharp interior corners of the fiberglass panels were rejected by the RF engineers. When you try to blend something into a building facade, differential weathering of exposed surfaces makes the antenna show up anyway, and you have to keep sending out painters to reapply the "make-up". $$$ The trees have to be made out of something that will stand up to weather and look OK for many years. Pine needles (fake trees are almost always "pines") in front of the antennas have to be designed not to scatter the signal. Who wants to climb the pole and replace branches? $$$
- Overly tall poles are rare. The higher the pole, the more other cells that pole can "see", the more interference. You only see really tall poles or towers in very flat areas where the RF engineers can spread things way out. In even modest topography, the coverage area per pole is surprisingly small. This is exacerbated, as pointed out in the article, by the rising demand for "in-building coverage" which requires much stronger signals.
- The best solution I was never able to implement was one which strung a series of small antennas along existing power/phone pole lines. Planners in the rich suburbs were much more amenable to this kind of thing, and the tech exists somewhat, but negotiating an agreement among the several utility companies who own the poles and right-of-ways jointly proved infuriating to the the (unbelievably impatient and fractious) cellphone companies.
- My advice: If you're rich and you're about to get a tree tower giving you the finger from the highest hill in your otherwise pristine town, hire a consultant to negotiate a deal with your utility companies to let the wireless carriers string tiny repeaters down your streets. If you make an alternative available, the wireless company pretty much has to take it.
No, I think it has to do with the monstrous eyesores that are being constructed every place you look, called "cell phone antennas". People see how ugly and intrusive these things are, and then you come along and say YOU want to put an antenna up, too. You're getting painted with the cellphone antenna paintbrush.
And yes, they are ugly, and no, I do not want them making the already cluttered community landscape any uglier, and no, they certainly don't belong on every hilltop you can see. And yes, I'm a ham, and I deal with emergency services and the local sheriff's office.
FYI, Cingular uses GSM as well. The interesting one to look into is how Sprint & Nextel are getting along - their services are completely different.