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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
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
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!
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.
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
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
which of course probably makes our friend prostoalex a bunch of money.
No, it doesn't, NYT articles linked from iWon don't require registration and login.
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.
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.
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?
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.