Today in Tedium: Earlier this week, I got an email about an old piece that brought me joy. It was about one of the tedious topics I hit in my first year, when I was still trying to figure out what Tedium would end up being, but it still had some shape. (For one thing, it was half the length of a modern Tedium issue.) The email complimented the topic of the old piece, about the controversy and unpopularity of cell towers, suggesting that, despite its age, the subject still had some value. (If I get a nice email about this piece, I would love to revisit it. I feel like I took my shot too early on.) A lot has happened since I originally wrote it—the 3G network has been effectively dismantled, and 5G is basically a given in most places. Has the unsightly cell tower gotten any easier to hide? Today’s Tedium tries to find out. — Ernie @ Tedium
Today’s GIF is from the most recent innovation in cell tower NIMBYism. If you know, you know. If you don’t, keep reading.
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78
The number of months in prison that San Antonio, Texas resident Sean Aaron Smith received in a federal case in which he was charged with felony possession of a firearm, as well as arson affecting interstate and foreign commerce. Put another way: Smith was lighting cell towers on fire in and around San Antonio out of what an FBI special agent described as “anti-5G ideology.” It’s a case that hints at the controversy the towers still cause.
An example of a mobile cell tower. This will not be the smallest cell tower we cover in this issue. (Wikimedia Commons)
Five common kinds of cell towers that generally aren’t hidden
- Monopole towers. These are the most obvious kinds. They essentially tower over everything in a single cylindrical pole with a bunch of antennas at the top. Depending on where you put them, they can be extremely noticeable—which is a big part of the reason people complain about them. These are generally the type that people convert into trees—as one company refers to them, a monopine.
- Lattice tower. These are the kinds of towers that you think of when you think of radio antennas. Built with a mesh of steel or aluminum connectors, these towers can also be used to deliver electrical lines. In the case of radio communication, they are popular if you have numerous types of radio signals to distribute. Fun fact: The Eiffel Tower isn’t just for show—it is a lattice tower that sports literally 120 antennas at the top of the structure, some of which have extended the landmark’s height.
- Guyed towers. Unlike lattice towers, which are self-standing, guyed towers are held up with tension cables attached to the ground. A good way to think about them is to consider them like the mast of a sailboat, which is controlled and managed by various types of rigging to keep it stable. Despite this complexity, guyed towers can often be taller than either lattice or monopole towers, and are often more cost-effective.
- Water towers. In many small communities, water towers are often the tallest structure you’ll find, which makes them attractive options for compromise when installing cell towers without disrupting the nearby community. (They still complain, though.) The option has become popular enough that the American Water Works Association announced earlier this year that it was helping to build a new standard for adding cellular antennas to water towers, if something like that interests you.
- Mobile cell towers, a.k.a. “cells on wheels.” These are smaller types of cell towers—as the name implies, easy to transport—that can be installed in locations where an immediate need exists. The concept is similar to the satellite trucks that TV reporting crews might use, except they are designed to support increased cellular device use during a situation where more use is expected or necessary. In other words, mobile cell towers are particularly popular near stadiums around football games or concerts, as well as during emergency situations, where traditional cell towers might be offline for whatever reason. They came in handy during the recent spate of hurricanes earlier this year.
Does this kind of approach still make sense? (CharClarPhoto/Flickr)
Which is better: Many small cell towers or a few big ones? You might be surprised by the answer
Back in 2015, my piece was built around an unusual fact that has gotten somewhat more attention in the years since: Cell towers often need to be hidden in plain sight to make them comfortable for the average person.
While prior reporting already existed about this phenomenon, it’s more recently become great source material for episodes of popular podcasts, along with additional stories that add additional color to the fun twist on modern light. A fine-art photographer named Annette LeMay Burke got an entire coffee-table book out of her photos of cleverly hidden cell towers, some of which were hidden in crosses in the front of churches, in flagpoles, or even in signage.
These towers are all built around a single idea: Putting towers everywhere can be ugly and unsightly, and can be unpopular with the local community if they fail to properly blend into the nearby environment.
But what if we’re thinking about this all wrong? What if the way cell towers should work is not in the form of a handful of huge towers, but hundreds or thousands of small ones?
This is a finding in a recent study conducted by researchers at UC San Diego, in a report that suggested that, at least in dense areas, we might be better off if cell towers were as common as street lights. The concept, which the team calls DensQuer, would rely on many small, densely distributed base stations, placed on the tops of trees or street poles, which would end up being closer to end users. Using the Sionna open-source ray-tracing framework to test their theories, they came up with an approach to cellular deployment that would be a bit closer to the ground level.
Can we hide a cell tower in this street light? (Mikael Kristenson/Unsplash)
Why do it this way? For one thing, power savings—both on the cell-tower side and on the battery side. As the report notes:
This optimized small-cell network is achieved by placing them strategically and relying on the explicit environment knowledge about the setting given forth by a ray-tracing computational framework. Further, the achieved small-cell network has a total power consumption of about 300W, that is 700W less than the 1000W single base-station. In addition, we also explore the benefits which the smartphone clients enjoy because of this small-cell network, which results in 10-15 dB lower transmit power, and about 50% longer battery life.
While small-cell networks of this nature have been tried in the past, the UC San Diego researchers have used optimized placement to cut down what might usually be 100 different cell sites to between 25 and 30. That sort of tuning could make our phones more efficient.
The challenge, of course, involves making it all work. It doesn’t exactly sound easy. Maybe this is being proposed as public infrastructure, but one could imagine the cost falling to the home owner in some communities. I’m sure your cell provider or HOA would just love to pass that cost onto you.
Would an idea like this be a success? Well, it turns out that we have an example of this playing out in public in America’s largest city. And it’s worth digging into.
142k
The number of cell towers in operation in the U.S. in 2022, according to a white paper from the Wireless Infrastructure Association. But those are just the big ones: Another 209,500 macrocell sites, 678,700 macrocell sectors, 452,000 outdoor small cell nodes, and 747,400 indoor cell nodes were also reported. In other words, there are already cell towers friggin’ everywhere, and in the 5G era, many of them are not the giant towers people associate with cell towers.
You know what New York City needed? 2,000 of these big, stupid towers. (Wikimedia Commons)
Link5G: NYC’s ugly entry into the miniaturized cell tower debate
New York is a city full of hustle and bustle, with lots of little additions becoming part of the city’s landscape that just feel like, even though they weren’t there originally, they kind of fit.
An example of this is scaffolding, which has become a fact of life in the city. There’s an excellent episode of the must-watch footage-plus-monologue series How To With John Wilson that talks scaffolding, a portion of which I’ll share above.
Whether via public works or new regulations, every city administration adds something new to the mix. The main architectural contribution of the Eric Adams era is the miniature cell tower, a concept called Link5G. To be clear, we are talking miniature compared to the giant fake trees and radio-wave-emitting water towers that pock the landscape. These things are big and ugly and distracting, somehow looking larger and dumber than any nearby street light or scaffolding display ever could.
From a news report on the announcement of these. The problem is not the idea, which is solid. It’s that they look big and dumb and stupid, and their big, dumb, stupidity was completely avoidable.
A recent Gothamist piece described them like this: “The 32-foot-tall structures, which resemble giant tampon applicators emerging from the sidewalk, offer the same services as the LinkNYC electronic billboards that popped up around the city in 2016.”
(I cannot add anything to that to improve it, so I won’t.)
They are objectively ugly, and the reason they’re objectively ugly is that, beyond their relatively large size, the city has put basically zero effort into making them look like part of the city landscape. Unlike the ideas proposed in the DensQuer research, the towers make little effort to actually mesh into their environment. (Free suggestion: Paint them literally any other color than silver. Please.)
One imagines that if the Adams administration had thought this through a little more, they could have turned these antennas into miniature art installations that actually neatly fit their neighborhoods. But they didn’t. So, as a result, there has been pushback in some neighborhoods around their installation. It’s not just aesthetics, either: The design is so distracting that beyond being incompatible with existing neighborhoods, some think they could distract drivers and become a safety hazard. In other words, the suburban NIMBY debates around cell towers have officially hit the Big Apple, except in a completely different (and arguably more reasonable) way.
If I was in the market for a Kia, you bet your ass that I would be buying it from John Starks.
It’s obvious the critics have a point. For example, back in 2022, New York Knicks legend John Starks found himself at the center of the controversy around the towers after one was put right in front of a Kia dealership he owns, with the tower located right in front of his name. Apparently, the city decided to put the tower there without talking to the dealership, and before Starks’ name was in place.
Something about the way these towers were installed seems to validate criticisms that feel far-fetched elsewhere.
But the problem is that these things were not thought through for reasons beyond their visual impact. It turns out they were also built without any buy-in from cell providers. Currently, they’re ugly without actually having the ability to distribute 5G signals, the reason that the things are ugly in the first place. As noted in the Gothamist piece we referenced above (yes, the one that compares them to tampon applicators), most of the space in the towers has not actually been rented out to telecom companies, which haven’t seen the upside in small-scale installations of this nature, so they’re not actually serving their purpose at this time.
Despite this, the LinkNYC project’s own survey suggests that the haters make up a much smaller percentage of critics than reported, with 76% stating that they support the installation of the devices, which also offer free Wi-Fi access. I’m convinced people like the service—obviously, it’s useful! The problem is whoever designed them thought it was more important that they had the project’s branding, rather than the neighborhood’s. It’s 100% a design problem, not a people-freaked-out-by-5G problem.
However, more of them are coming. Please, whoever is putting them in: Talk to an industrial designer to make them at least look like they fit in a cityscape instead of an episode of The Jetsons. I hear the city has a lot of them.
“Once each neighborhood selects the pole design consistent with the existing street light fixtures already arrayed on their streets, we can deploy this solution within six months.”
— Jim Lockwood, the founder and CEO of Comptek Technologies, a company founded in NYC that literally specializes in concealing small-size 5G towers into the cityscape, speaking to the New York Post last year about his offer to replace the Link5G towers with less-obtrusive variants. The company’s CityPole has already been implemented in large cities across the country. Imagine if NYC officials talked to them first.
Over the past decade, the debate over not-in-my-backyard cell towers has continued unabated, and it likely won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, no matter how large or small the towers eventually get.
It is an example of the competition that our outer society faces constantly—between the technology that advances it and the physical manifestations of that technology that we often struggle to make peace with.
It has been unfortunate to see principled criticisms about the towers turn into misinformation, however. The case of convicted cell-tower arsonist Sean Aaron Smith, mentioned above, only hints at how poorly we have managed discussions around the issues.
The initial misunderstandings around COVID-19 did not help matters, to be honest, only helping lingering misinformation around cellular signals turn into a major thread of conflict during an intensely political period.
Protests are still a key element of the cell tower debate. Earlier this year, there were protests in the Miami-Dade area of Florida around the installation of cell towers, many similar in size to the ones upsetting NYC residents.
One gets the feeling that there needs to be more dialogue between communities and their local government to ensure that towers are being installed thoughtfully. Not everyone has the name recognition of John Starks—not everyone can go to The New York Post if a cell tower shows up in front of their place of business. (I’m not even a Knicks fan, and John Starks is probably my favorite Knicks player of all time, so he gets a pass for complaining about cell towers.)
These objects remain controversial for what they are and how they present themselves. While we still have versions of them hiding as trees or on top of water towers, the truth is, if people know they’re out there, they will push back.
But, I have to admit, I still find the fact that we try to hide cell towers by dressing them up as trees to be endlessly amusing, all these years later.
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