Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Cell phone towers go undercover these days

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 09:00:42 -0400

Cell phone towers go undercover these days

'Stealth'
telecommunications towers going up to address aesthetic,
environmental concerns

By RUSTY DENNEN

Sumerduck 'pine' blends technology with surroundings

Nestled in a grove of oaks off Sumerduck Road in southern
Fauquier County is a very unusual tree.

From a distance it looks like a towering Virginia pine, but up
close is the giveaway: a cylindrical metallic trunk rising about
100 feet off the ground, tapering to a crown of fake green
branches bristling with electronic equipment.

Welcome to the brave new world of telecommunications
technology, where "stealth" wireless telephone towers are
being disguised as trees, flagpoles--even cactuses out
West.

As the demand for tower sites to fill in gaps in cell phone
coverage areas grows, Verizon, Sprint and other providers
have been resorting to camouflage to locate towers in areas
where a traditional tower would not be allowed.

John Johnson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless in
Maryland, said the companies first try to "co-locate" on an
existing tower. If that's not possible or feasible, then the
company must look at other alternatives, such as hiding the
equipment on a water tower, in a church steeple, farm silo
or even in a specially designed flagpole.

"The folks we employ to help them blend in go to
painstaking efforts to make it that way," Johnson said. For
example, the antennas and wiring can be painted or
textured to look as if they were part of a high-rise building.

The most expensive last resort is a free-standing tower
specially designed to look like part of the local landscape.

"We just got an OK for a tree site in James City County,"
Johnson said. Another tower in the Little Neck area of
Tidewater will be constructed as part of a light pole. "In Rock
Creek Park in D.C., we have a tower disguised as a light
pole at a tennis stadium."

Jim Fryer, owner of Fryer's TowerSource in Lansdowne, Pa.,
which tracks the industry, said there are approximately
150,000 telecommunications towers nationwide. Of those,
maybe 2 to 3 percent are stealth towers.

"Those are sort of the last resort for the tower companies,"
Fryer said, because of the additional cost. A conventional
tower might cost $20,000 to $30,000, depending upon the
height and equipment required. A stealth tower could cost
three times that much.

Fryer said that there's been a lull in the construction of the
more costly towers in the past year or so because of the
slow economy.

The tower in Sumerduck was installed last year for Verizon
Wireless. Fauquier tightly controls the number and type of
towers for aesthetic reasons, said Douglas Morgan, the
county's senior planner.

Companies are encouraged either to use existing towers or
to use hidden locations, away from ridges and slopes.

"We're rather have numerous towers that nobody sees than
to have 20 or 30 that are clearly visible," he said. There are
53 existing or approved locations and eight to 10 more
under review.

"We want to be in keeping with the agricultural and historic
districts and be consistent with our vision statement
regarding progress for the county," Morgan said. "A lot of
people moved to Fauquier to get away from visual
eyesores."

There are several other fake-pine towers in Virginia. One is
at Mount Vernon, George Washington's historic home along
the Potomac River, and another is in a Fairfax County park.

Tom Matthews, a spokesman for Sprint PCS, said many
existing traditional towers already have several carriers
using the space, so new sites must be found to fill in
coverage gaps.

"In many cases, if we can't hide them, we make them look
like a part of the landscape," he said.

Sprint has also erected the tree look-alikes, and has done
some other creative camouflage jobs. Last October in
Fayetteville, N.C., for example, Sprint commissioned artist
Tom Grubb to design a kinetic sculpture to place atop a
typical tower to mark the 100th anniversary of the Wright
brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk.

"Sprint Voyager" is 35 feet long and looks like a cross
between a sailboat and a missile. The sculpture moves like a
weather vane.

"It really combined aesthetics with functionality that
everybody embraced," Matthews said.

That hasn't been the case with many tower proposals.
Nearby residents often don't want want them, and local
zoning ordinances are beginning to tightly control their
placement. Locally, there has been opposition to several
proposed towers over the past two years.

"It's an ongoing challenge to fill in those gaps and to
coexist," Matthews said.

The Fredericksburg area is one of the fastest-growing in the
state, posing a challenge for wireless providers. It also
historically was neglected, caught in a gap-in-service limbo
between metropolitan centers in Richmond and Washington.

Typically, the carriers contract with a company such as
Larson Camouflage, a division of the Larson Co., in Tucson,
Ariz., to build their towers.

Larson was among the first in the business and got started
in 1992. It has put up about 300 stealth towers. Now there
are about 10 companies designing them.

"The cactuses are the more unusual ones," said Steven S.
Meyer, the company's business development manager. They
look very much like the real thing, only a little taller--about
50 feet--than the average saguaro cactus. "We've done
about 10 of them between Tucson and Phoenix. In Virginia, I
imagine we've done five or six [pine trees]," Meyer said.
Larson Camouflage built the one at Mount Vernon.

"Generally, most of them are pines on the East Coast,"
Meyer said.

Date published: 5/10/03

http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2003/052003/05102003/970518

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