Subject: [NEXTEL-1] HARD CELL

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 20:13:57 -0400

HARD CELL

GOING MOBILE: Ian Alexander, a senior at Western Washington
University, checks his phone's built-in directory while standing in
the shadow of a new cellular tower disguised as a flagpole near the
Sehome Village shopping center in Bellingham. DISGUISED: A fake
evergreen on Taylor Avenue in Happy Valley and a flagpole near
the Sehome Village shopping center have one thing in common --
they're cell-phone communications towers.

More and more people are switching to mobile
phones. But nobody seems to want a
communications tower nearby.

John Stark, The Bellingham Herald

If you want to reach Ian Alexander, you'll need to dial the 509 area
code, even though he lives in Bellingham, not Spokane.

Alexander, a 21-year-old senior at Western Washington University, is
one of a growing number of people who rely on wireless phones for all
of their telephone needs.

He uses the traditional telephone line in his apartment for his
computer's Internet connection, but sees no reason to use it for
anything else. He brought his cell phone to Bellingham from his home
in Spokane three years ago, and has used it exclusively since. To him,
it's an obvious choice.

"There's only one phone number," he said. "It's easier for my parents
to get ahold of me, it's easier for my friends to get ahold of me."

But the more that wireless phones are used, the more that wireless
companies must build antennas to provide reliable service to their
customers.

America's cities and countrysides already bristle with an estimated
200,000 such antennas. Some estimates say that number could reach
1 million by the end of the decade, and companies are already having
trouble finding good places to put them.

In just a decade, the wireless phone
has gone from novelty to necessity for
a majority of Americans. In 1993, fewer
than 20 million people had them. Today,
estimates reach 130 million, and still
climbing fast. Two-thirds of American
adults now own a wireless phone,
according to Scarborough Research, a
leading New York market research firm.
Even as the number of wireless phones
in the country grows, the average time
an individual spends on his or her
wireless phone is growing, too.

Wireless phones first caught on as a
stopgap that people used in their cars
and other places where no traditional
phone was in reach. Now, Alexander is
one of millions who see no point in
having two phone numbers.

At the same time, millions are using their wireless phones in ways that
Alexander Graham Bell never imagined. Today's phones can be used to
surf the Internet, send e-mail and take and send digital photos.

More antennas

Each wireless phone antenna has a fixed capacity. When capacity is
reached, the phone service provider needs to build more antennas or
face hordes of unhappy customers. The explosive growth in wireless
phone use has providers scrambling to build enough antennas to send
and receive all of the traffic.

Until recently, companies could meet the need by installing their
equipment on existing radio towers or on tall downtown buildings and
hills. Few of those installations attracted public notice.

Bellingham City Planner Jackie Lynch said 26 wireless phone
installations have been built in the city since the start of 1999.

But as wireless phone use continues its explosive growth, companies
are having a tougher time finding such sites. Bellingham and cities
across the country are scrambling to balance the need for more
wireless phone capacity with neighborhood concerns about visual
blight.

One company, T-Mobile USA, has been the most active extending its
system of antennas in Bellingham and environs.

AT&T Wireless and Nextel are the only other companies that have
notified city officials about projects on the drawing board, Lynch said.
Both are exploring the idea of putting an antenna atop a light
standard at Civic Stadium.

T-Mobile is a nationwide company formerly known as Voice Stream
Wireless. Its parent company is Deutsche Telecom AG, a German
multinational with $51 billion in revenue last year. T-Mobile's call
center in Bellingham employs about 500 people, making it one of the
city's biggest employers.

Laura Altschul, spokeswoman for T-Mobile, said the company's high
profile here is one of the reasons for its flurry of activity in antenna
construction. Employees and their neighbors and friends tend to
choose the company as their wireless provider, she said. At the same
time, in comparison to its competitors, the company has a smaller
portion of the broadcast spectrum to work with.

"The challenge for us is to find a balance of meeting that need ...
with the sensitivity of the community with respect to the aesthetics,"
Altschul said.

Columbia compromise

In their first big face-off with a hostile neighborhood last spring,
T-Mobile representatives wound up making a deal that left most
people satisfied.

The trouble began when the company proposed putting an antenna
on a 63-foot pole behind a home in the 2200 block of Henry Street, in
the midst of Columbia neighborhood. Homeowners there were soon
bombarding city planners with letters, e-mails and phone calls. More
than 100 people came to a neighborhood meeting on the issue, and
anti-T-Mobile signs sprouted on front yards.

After city officials told company representatives that city regulations
would force them through a lengthy permitting process if they
persisted with their plan to put the tower in a historic neighborhood,
T-Mobile engineers and Columbia residents put their heads together
and came up with an alternative. The company now intends to cover
the same service area with antennas hidden inside flagpoles to be
installed at Bellingham Technical College and the Bellingham fire
station at 1800 Broadway.

Now that the flagpole has emerged as a seemingly acceptable form of
wireless phone antenna, Bellingham is likely to look increasingly
patriotic in the years ahead.

T-Mobile has already obtained a permit for a flagpole antenna at
Whatcom Falls Mini Mart, 1480 Electric Ave., after neighbors objected
to a pole proposed in the nearby neighborhood.

The company has also applied for a permit to install a flagpole at 1701
Birchwood Ave., in a commercial area near I V Wilson Florist.

But neighborhood groups are keeping a watchful eye on the flagpole
proposals, too.

Rodd Pemble, president of Birchwood Neighborhood Association, said
the unusually thick, 70-foot-tall pole proposed for his neighborhood is
going to become a permanent and, to some, an unwelcome, part of
the view from the nearby Bay-to-Baker Trail.

"It's going to dominate the skyline because it sticks up 30 feet above
the power poles," he said.

The association wants T-Mobile to contribute half the cost of a ramp
to connect the trail to the sidewalk along Birchwood Ave- nue, an
expense of $25,000 to $35,000 for the company, Pemble said. As he
sees it, that would be fair compensation for the antenna's impact on
views from the trail.

Altschul wouldn't comment on the proposal, saying the company
doesn't negotiate deals via the newspaper.

Local clout

Richard Comi, a consultant in Glenmont, N.Y., who represents local
governments dealing with wireless phone issues, said neighborhoods
and local governments are in a fairly strong negotiating position with
the companies. That's because companies are in a hurry to get new
antennas in place to meet customer demand, and because the money
generated from each new antenna is significant, he said. He
estimated each new antenna is worth an average of $2,000 to $3,000
a day in added revenue to a phone company.

Altschul rejected Comi's figures. In an e-mail, she said it generally
takes a company seven years to recover the cost of a new
installation, and averages are meaningless because the number of
customers served by a given antenna can vary greatly.

Whatever the sums involved, Altschul acknowledged that T-Mobile is
in a hurry to meet customer demand.

And Lynch noted that all of the companies are in hot competition. If
customers subscribe to a given company's service and are unhappy
with its reliability, other companies are ready to take their business.

If no regulations are in place, or if regulations are not rigorously
enforced, wireless companies will naturally build what is cheapest and
most convenient for them, Comi said. He said that was what he
himself did when he was an executive at a wireless company.

The Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 weakens the power of
local governments to regulate the location of wireless phone
antennas. The law gives companies the power to put their antennas
anywhere, but only if they can prove that a given location is essential
to providing wireless service. If they can't meet that burden of proof,
antenna locations must comply with local rules.

Comi said that means local governments should be prepared to hire
their own experts to evaluate company assertions about the need for
a tower of a certain size in a certain location.

City planner Lynch said that's what Bellingham would do, and the
phone company would have to pay the cost.

Wireless phone companies sometimes contend that if they don't get
what they want, residents will have to suffer poor-quality service. But
Comi said acceptable compromises can always be found, that cities
don't have to choose between aesthetics and good wireless service.

"This is not an issue of 'we' versus 'they,' " he said.

So far, that has been the case in Bellingham, Lynch said, with city
rules helping neighborhoods avoid the most-negative impacts.

"It's getting managed," she said. "It's not at a level that will make
everybody happy all the time. I don't know that that's possible."

Whatcom County Planning Director Hal Hart said the county's
regulations are roughly similar to Bellingham's, but county planners will
be reviewing them to make county and city regulations as comparable
as possible.

Busy future

Lynch wondered if problems will mount as wireless phone usage
continues to mushroom, with no end now in sight.

"What happens five years from now?" she asked. "Suddenly every
neighborhood has a 40-foot tower every 10 blocks."

Altschul said her company alone has 11 new Whatcom County sites in
the planning stage, and the company released a partial list.

Over the next two to three years, T-Mobile is likely to need 10 to 15
more antennas, she said, adding that future estimates are dubious in
the fast-moving wireless industry.

Lynch said some city residents favor development of a long-range
plan for locating wireless antennas, but said that would be difficult as
long as nobody knows how great the future demand will be. And each
company has its own system with unique problems providing service,
she added.

"Every company has its own quilt, and the patches are all different
shapes," she said.

For the moment, Lynch said, the regulatory system appears to be
working. The latest complaint she's been hearing from neighbors is the
potentially irritating sound of big American flags flapping in the breeze.

As she sees it, that complaint is a good sign, that more substantive
concerns about the antennas are being addressed, for now.

"There will continue to be issues for the neighbors as cell towers
come in," she said. "It's new and it's scary. ... People demand cell
phone access."

Reach John Stark at 715-2274 or [email-masked].

http://news.bellinghamherald.com/stories/20030824/TopStories/153091.shtml

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for Your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark
Printer at Myinks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US & Canada. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511
http://us.click.yahoo.com/l.m7sD/LIdGAA/qnsNAA/61FxlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/