Americans demand cell phones, pagers and all the portable accouterments of the Information Age. But they hate to look out from the front porch and see the unsightly towers and antennas that make the technology work. Detractors say that these antenna sites ruin the landscape and lower property values and worry that they may (though there is no definitive evidence) cause health problems. At the same time, the wireless revolution is exploding, with 50 million people currently using some type of cellular phone and a projected 50,000 new antennas needed by the next century. The rapid growth has spurred the cellular industry into devising new ways of making its antenna sites more palatable to the public. But it has also led to scores of conflicts with localities around the country, some even uglier than the one at Timberly South.
The strife between carriers and communities has its immediate roots in the government’s 1994 auctions of radio-frequency spectrum rights for Personal Communications Systems (PCS). PCS phones use digital technology for wireless calls and add amenities such as call forwarding and call waiting. Companies like Sprint, AT&T, Western Wireless and Omnipoint spent billions procuring the rights to offer these services and now must race against each other and the older, analog cellular carriers to build their networks-and start paying off their debt to the FCC. “The cellular carriers have such a grasp on subscribership that PCS companies are well advised to hurry,” says Patricia Martin of Decision Resources, a technology research group.
But in order for the new systems to work, the PCS carriers must build and place evenly spaced sets of antennas and routing computers, called cell sites. Each cell site picks up a caller’s signal when he enters its particular area, and then seamlessly passes the call to the next station when he leaves. In an area where no cell site exists, called a “dead spot,” a customer’s call gets disconnected. (Cellular folks privately call this a “redial opportunity.”)
To build these cell sites and eliminate dead spots, the carriers need approval from the often cabalistic zoning boards of local governments. That’s where they get into trouble. Last year Sprint PCS asked the Medina, Wash., board for permission to place a 100-foot tower in the woodsy, residential town, which is adjacent to Highway 520 and thousands of phone-clutching, Seattle-bound commuters. Faced with seven applications for towers and fearing that it was turning into a “cellular-phone antenna farm,” as one local attorney put it, the city council declared a six-month moratorium on permits. The industry challenged Medina in court-and lost. Because of that ruling, there are 606 moratoriums currently in effect around the country on the siting of wireless facilities.
In the middle of the larger conflict is, not surprisingly, the federal government. Both the cellular-phone industry and localities fiercely lobbied Congress over what the 1996 Telecommunications Act would say about who should decide where cell sites can go. The act ended up preserving the zoning rights of communities with one exception: they could not deny cell-site requests on the basis of health concerns fithe emissions met federal safety guidelines. Unsatisfied, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) asked the FCC last August to further limit the regulatory authority of communities, and to forbid them from imposing delays on tower construction. The government, argues Thomas E. Wheeler, president of the CTIA, should “assure that the provision of wireless service to consumers is not hamstrung by local politics.” For their part, communities refuse to cede zoning power. In the past two years, cities in at least seven states have ignored the Telecommunications Act and blocked cell sites over health concerns, and then been ordered by the courts to reconsider.
Do antennas actually pose a health risk? Cell sites emit radio-frequency (RF) waves that operate at a wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum between television and microwave ovens. The FCC has established guidelines for how much exposure is safe, and there are no studies showing that the acceptable doses are harmful to the public. According to Dr. Nancy Dreyer of the research group Epidemiology Resources, long-term studies are still being conducted. But, she says, “exposure to cellular antennas at a distance is safer than holding up phones to your head, which itself has not even proved harmful.” Still, there is no consensus in the scientific community, and as in the similar debate over power lines, activists claim some people are particularly vulnerable to RF.
Regardless, the facts have taken a back seat to emotion in many communities. Earlier this year AT&T Wireless services approached Rogers Forge, Md., and asked where it could put a 100-foot tower. The town directed the company to the St. Pius X Roman Catholic Church and its parochial school, which agreed to lease space for $90,000 over five years. But then parents got wind of the deal and expressed their concerns in raucous community hearings. Late last month the church sent AT&T hiking. “We decided it was best to continue to get along with our neighbors,” says the pastor, Father Thomas J. Golueke.
A bigger sticking point between the cellphone industry and local communities may be a simple lack of trust. In one district on the north side of Pittsburgh, a company that leases space to cell carriers asked for permission to install the cables that would anchor a proposed 900-foot tower, to be built across district lines. After the request was denied, the company went ahead and built the tower itself within the district. It got approval from a low-level zoning administrator, taking advantage of a loophole in city law and effectively circumventing the city councfi. “The industry has really abused a lot of the municipalities,” charges Pittsburgh city councilman Dan Onorato.
For all the contention, though, there are many signs that the architects of the wireless superhighway may be working to smooth the ride. Although PCS antennas need to be spaced closer together than cellular ones, they don’t have to be quite as high off the ground. For that reason, the use of rooftops and other existing structures “is being viewed as a real market solution to many of the siting problems the industry has encountered,” according to Gary Pudles of Philadelphia-based Apex Site Management, a firm that helps property owners attract and manage rooftop tenants. For example, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) thinks it has found gold in the rooftops of its much maligned behemoth housing projects. This week it will close its first deal, with Sprint PCS, to put antennas on the top of a building on the north side of the city. The deal will net the authority around $60,000 over the next five years. “We are trying to take what one would consider our debits and make them into assets,” says CHA executive director Joseph Shuldiner.
The industry has also innovated new ways of disguising antennas: as church bell towers, water-tower catwalks, even trees. In New York City carriers are leasing thousands of lampposts, traffic lights and highway signs and will attach antennas painted to match the color of their metal hosts. Cellular-phone carriers are also aggressively “co-locating,” joining with their competitors to cluster antennas and make them seem less ubiquitous to the public. Conflicts with local governments, it seems, are only a short-term setback in the face of voracious demand for cellular phones. So Americans will likely get their wireless gadgets after all.
