Leaning Towers

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.

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.

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.