From Sykesville to San Francisco, people are making a dreadful discovery about cellular phones: You need towers to babble.
Worse yet, one might be moving in next door.
Before zoning boards and planning commissions all over the country, horrified homeowners are battling the wireless telecommunications industry over plans to locate cellular and other communications towers in their neighborhoods.
The costly struggle, coming at a time when consumers' hunger for wireless communications is all but insatiable, threatens to delay improvements and price cuts that could make wireless telephones a rival to traditional phone service.
The Baltimore area has its share of battlegrounds in this Information Age war. Within the past year, zoning hearings in Baltimore, Carroll, Howard and Anne Arundel counties have all been the scenes of bitter protests over proposed communications towers. The Cellular Telephone Industry Association (CTIA) believes the problem is so serious that in December, it petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to pre-empt state and local powers to regulate towers, arguing that the growth of a vital utility is imperiled by "not-in-my-backyard" (NIMBY) activists. The threat is especially acute for companies that are spending billions to enter the fledgling personal communications service industry. PCS providers will have to build an entirely new network in the coming years, and the pervasive resistance to towers could leave gaping holes in their networks and compromise their ability to compete with the entrenched cellular industry.
Both cellular and PCS industry executives say they have no interest in picking fights with their own prospective customers. They say they avoid building towers wherever they can but that the demand for wireless services forces them to build ever closer to residential areas.
"Towers are expensive for us to build, they're a zoning nightmare, but where we need one, we need one," said Scott Schelle, executive vice president of American Personal Communications, a Bethesda-based PCS company that is building a network of relay stations as part of its plan to begin offering services in the region later this year.
The industry's woes have raised concerns at high levels of government.
"If a truly ubiquitous competitive wireless market is to develop, the industry cannot be held up by occasionally irresponsible local zoning boards; consumers don't want coverage to look like Swiss cheese," FCC Chairman Reed Hundt told the CTIA convention in New Orleans last week.
And House Speaker Newt Gingrich, normally an ardent foe of increased federal power, indicated in a speech at the same convention that he sympathizes with the industry.
"We have to look at those areas where the national economy requires pre-emption. And the reason we went from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution was to allow pre-emption where necessary," the Georgia Republican said, according to the CTIA's transcription of the speech.
Initially regarded as an affectation of yuppie stockbrokers, mobile phones are now vital for millions of middle-class moms and dads more concerned about security than securities. In 1990, about 5 million Americans were cellular subscribers; last year the total passed 20 million.
This region is a particular hotbed of wireless communications. Robert L. Johnson Jr., regional vice president of Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems, said his company has experienced 53 percent growth in subscribers in the Baltimore-Washington area alone over the past year.
And every time a new cellular phone is sold, the need for network capacity grows. Translation: more towers.
Towers need to be close
The Cellular Telephone Industry Association estimates that as many as 115,000 new cell sites -- relay stations with antennas mounted on a high building or a tower -- will be needed nationwide by 2000. And unlike a radio station or a power plant, a cell site can't be located in Parkville and serve Ruxton. Because of signal range limitations, it has to be close.
And the outlook is for even more demand as new voice and data transmission technologies emerge, often with the backing of the federal government.
The FCC, for instance, is so thrilled at the success of the cellular industry that it is auctioning off big chunks of the radio spectrum so personal communications services can create a parallel wireless network to compete with both cellular and conventional phone companies.
Dazzled by the potential of PCS, the nation's largest telecommunications companies have bid more than $4.5 billion in the FCC's current auction. For weeks GTE Corp. and AT&T; Corp. have been locked in a bidding war for the only Baltimore-Washington license in the auction, with the price spiraling above $120 million.
The eventual winner could rue the day it prevailed. For along with its license, it will have bought the headache of confronting the counterparts of Kathy Blanco-Losada and Anne Lukiewski in every community between the Rappahannock and Pennsylvania as it seeks local approvals to build the needed towers.
Ms. Blanco-Losada has devoted countless hours and shelled out $6,000 in lawyers' fees to fight Cellular One's plans for a 200-foot tower in Sykesville -- on an elevated site the company's engineers regard as critical to their coverage of southern Carroll County.
The Sykesville dispute has been especially long and bitter, dividing neighbors and the county government. In a saga that has gone on for a year and a half, the county's Board of Zoning Appeals has approved the tower, while the county commissioners have voted to stop construction. The matter is likely headed for the county Circuit Court.
Ms. Blanco-Losada said her main concern is that the tower could drag down property values in her wooded neighborhood -- and real estate professionals say such fears are well-grounded.
"It would very possibly lower property values because of the fear people have -- whether it's founded or unfounded -- of possible radioactivity," said Jackie Allen of Prudential Properties in Annapolis, who was Anne Arundel County's 1994 Realtor of the Year.
For Ms. Lukiewski, who has organized opposition to a 125-foot tower Cellular One wants to build in Ellicott City, that is the critical issue. She's read reports linking electromagnetic frequency (EMF) radiation from towers to brain tumors and leukemia, and she's worried that the tower would be only 185 feet from Patapsco Middle School.
"What the research ends up saying is that it's inconclusive," said Ms. Lukiewski, a teacher's assistant. "We take that as saying, as long as there's a shadow of a doubt, hey, we're talking radiation here."
Confusion over towers
Industry experts say opponents confuse cellular towers with high-voltage power lines, which operate at hundreds or even thousands of times the energy levels of cell sites. According to the CTIA, the typical tower emits 100 watts of power or less, compared with 100,000 watts from a typical FM radio tower.
In fact, industry executives point to a 1993 report in which FCC engineers said measurements at cellular sites showed that the levels of radio signals and microwaves were far below recommended limits.
"I've been told by experts that you get more electromagnetic radiation walking under the sun than standing under a cellular tower," said Steve Sitton, president of Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems' Cellular One operations in Baltimore-Washington.
Mr. Sitton estimated that the site selection and legal costs for the typical cell site run about $10,000-$20,000, but that a contested location would run closer to $50,000-$100,000. He would not specify the costs of the Sykesville or Ellicott City wrangles, but said they "would certainly be on the high end."
Besides driving up the cost of service, Mr. Sitton said, the protracted wrangling over cell sites hurts the quality of service.
"It just delays progress toward the quality communications that we want," he said. "We spend all day talking to people who can't understand why we don't have better coverage in one little area."
So far, Cellular One is on the winning side in Howard County. In December, the county Board of Appeals voted 3-1 to permit construction of the tower, although Ms. Lukiewski is considering a court appeal.
Some successes
DWhile tower opponents are facing long odds in Ellicott City, they have had their share of successes in Maryland and around the country.
In Anne Arundel, the residents won two battles last month as a zoning hearing examiner vetoed proposed tower sites for Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems and West Shore Communications Inc., a contractor for Cellular One and other wireless companies, in Edgewater and Gambrills respectively.
According to the trade journal Microwave News, San Francisco's school board banned new cellular antennas from school property in 1993, electing to forgo the rent cellular companies pay. In other communities from Merton, Wis., to Lincoln Park, N.J., community opposition has derailed plans to build cellular towers near schools and playgrounds.
And even the opponents' losing battles can yield long-term headaches for cellular companies. The controversy over the Cellular One tower in Sykesville has prompted the Carroll County commissioners to adopt more restrictive rules governing future towers.
The nub of the problem for the cellular industry is that most of the "easy" locations have already been taken.
Over the last decade, cellular antennas have sprouted like weeds atop the office buildings of downtown Baltimore and on towers in the industrial parks that line the Beltway. These high antennas could provide adequate coverage over a radius up to 6 miles as long as calling volume was relatively low, cellular executives say.
But now industry executives say the most urgent need for coverage has shifted to suburban communities where tall buildings are rare. These newer cell sites often cover a radius of only a half-mile to 2 miles, said Mr. Sitton.
Frustrated industry executives complain that the fiercest opposition to towers comes from "wealthy NIMBYs" in places such as Potomac, Crofton and northern Baltimore County. They say those are the same areas where the demand for service is greatest and the complaints are loudest when a call is dropped because of a "hole" in the carrier's coverage.
"Aesthetics is the No. 1 problem," said Jeff Owens, senior real estate manager at Cellular One's regional office in northern Anne Arundel County. "Many people couch their opposition in other things. . . . The No. 1 thing is 'I don't want to look at this.' "
Even with its plans to build 100 new cell sites this year, Cellular One's problems are mild compared with those facing American Personal Communications.
Cellular One at least has a network of 205 sites up and running. APC, one of three PCS pioneers that were given a head start in building a network, has had to start from scratch. And because PCS operates at lower power levels and higher frequencies than cellular, APC's network will require about three times as many sites as a comparable cellular network.
Anne Phillips, a spokeswoman for APC, said the typical site selection cost for APC is about $35,000, but that process can rise to $150,000-$200,000 if there is a zoning battle or if the company has to use such "stealth" methods as disguising a tower as a pine tree by coating the pole with synthetic "bark" and attaching fake branches.
Such daunting problems have raised doubts about the optimistic predictions by some government officials and industry executives that competition from PCS will lead to price cuts for all telephone services -- wired and wireless.
Al Jenkins, APC's director of real estate management, said the company will need 45 sites in the Baltimore-Washington area to launch service in October. Eventually, he'll need at least 400 sites. "It's going to cause quite a bit of controversy," he said.
APC might get some relief in March, when the state government is planning to launch a program that would open up its lands, buildings, communications towers and other state-owned structures for lease by wireless companies that want to build towers or place antennas.
But that still won't solve all of APC's problems, especially in residential neighborhoods.
"Baltimore County has suggested that you don't build towers up along the I-83 corridor in horse country," he said. "Anne Arundel has told us that if you're going to build a tower down in Davidsonville, you're going to have a fight."
Mr. Jenkins said the "gigantic" legal costs of gaining zoning approvals have soared far beyond APC's expectations.
"It's a very, very serious problem, and there's no way communications companies can build the information highway unless the counties cooperate," he said.