There’s apparently a debate raging in my town at the moment about whether to allow a permit for a mobile (cell) phone tower erection. And it seems that the naysayers are a bunch of precious petals who should go stick their heads down a dunny.
See, the proposal is for the towers to go BANG SMACK in the middle of a carpark. Behind a strip shopping centre. In town. And people think that having a tower is going to detract from the casual seaside ambience we all know and love?? Gimme a break.
Oh, and these are the very same folk who jump on social media to whinge like cow-cockies when their mobile coverage goes down.
First throw away your mobile phone, tablet and PC, and THEN you might be in a position to talk about destroying the ‘vibe’ of the town.
Hey, I can be a NIMBY when they try to build a stadium with PA and lights for night games in our residential neighborhood…
But a cell tower? Not exactly an eyesore. I hope they’re not paranoid about lethal phone signals…
Why not do what our church did? It’s an old gothic thing with a tower that’s the tallest structure, and when US Cellular wanted to put a tower on it, we prayerfully said unto them… BRIBE US! [Narrator: And bribe they did. And verily was the church budget much healthier ever since*.]*
Are they aware that there are numerous ways to camouflage cell sites? Especially if they’re not very tall, as I would expect with an installation at a strip mall. I’ve seen a variety of trees, flagpoles, sculptures, obelisks, windmills…all sorts of things.
Plus, of course, the companies do pay “bribes” (or at least rent) for the locations. One of my old jobs involved generating search rings for a cell company’s real estate group–identifying a general area for a site, so the agents could do property searches and negotiate with property owners. There were all sorts of stipulations that went into those contracts–camouflage/no camouflage, roof access (for rooftop sites), power and network infrastructure modifications, and (of course) rent. If a property owner demanded camouflage, they got less consideration on other elements.
If they were too persnickety, they got nothing, because the search rings were usually pretty big, at least in flat terrain. If the town says, “No permit!”, the company might find a more bribeable property owner just outside the town limits, put a tower there, and crank up the power on the sector pointing toward the town.
Yeah, we point these out when we go on long trips. The Harvard Lampoon guys unwittingly described these years before they actually existed in Bored of the Rings when they talked about Trees with Oddly Symmetrical-Looking Branches.
To be fair, there are other kinds of unconvincing disguised cell phone transmitters. Like the ones on chimneys, where the transmitters are painted with brick patterns, as if they’re high-tech chameleons trying to blend in
A coworker a few months ago approached me at work (I’m an IT guy at a state government agency) saying that a neighbor had an internet device installed on the side of his house (she wasn’t sure what it was), and ever since she has had trouble sleeping at night due to headaches. She wanted my professional opinion about what kind of shielding she could buy to protect herself from the microwaves giving her trouble.
I said there’s no way the device was powerful enough to have any effect on a person (through walls and over distance no less). I didn’t come right out and say she was a nut (though she has previously expressed her belief in alien conspiracies and healing crystals, to her credit she is often self-mocking of her own beliefs in casual conversation and knows her ideas are unpopular). But I did say there’s no way that device is actually doing anything to her. I tried to be respectful to her and not get personal in any way but she still briefly got angry and said I probably was gullible enough to believe that fluoride in drinking water isn’t harmful.
My reply to her was that I am an IT professional and by the nature of my profession I have to have an understanding of and respect for science. If she wants advice regarding an issue that involves rejecting mainstream, factual science, she needs to seek help from someone who isn’t a technology professional.
She understood and thanked me for my time (she’s wacky but not a jerk) but it reminded me that there are definitely people like that out there. If she had a cell tower within sight of her home she’d probably picket.
There’s one on my way to New Hampshire - twice as tall as the surrounding forest, and the “branches” on its entire length are exactly the same. So it basically looks like a giant bottle brush.
In Vermont there is a lot of debate about putting cell towers on ridgelines, where they need to go to work best. However, they can’t seem to put gigantic wind towers on ridgelines fast enough, so I don’t have a whole lot of respect for the anti-cell tower people.
There are a couple of places along Spirit Lake Highway (to the Mt. St. Helens area) where the regrowth consists of hillsides of disturbingly uniform spruce-looking things with that bottle brush look. Not huge, though. Probably a Weyerhaeuser replant, because it is hard to imagine nature doing anything that consistent.
I sympathize with the OP. My small, hilly town had lousy cell coverage for a long time, and everyone was pretty unified in agreeing that something needed to be done. So the phone company agreed to put up a nice, tall tower, but since it was going to take some time to situate it and clear the bureaucratic hurdles, they also agreed to temporarily install a transceiver on the church steeple in the meantime.
Big mistake. As soon as it went live, 75% of the town had great coverage, and decided the other 25% could go fuck themselves. They didn’t really need the tall, ugly tower after all. The town selectmen voted it down, and as a result, I had unreliable service for years until an even bigger and uglier tower was installed the next town over.
