Despite the fact that Apple has sold a whopping 3,000,000 units of its newest iPhone 4 since its release last month, the tech company has been swamped with complaints over the smartphones spotty reception and its problematic antenna design. The problem, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed in a press conference a few weeks ago, is twofold: First, users are unintentionally disrupting antenna reception when they touch a certain spot on the phone, and second, remember that it’s AT&T we’re dealing with here, so the coverage already sucks.
But in defence of the struggling telecom giant, Jobs did point to one glaring issue that companies establishing wireless coverage in major metropolitan areas face on a regular basis in America, it’s hard to get approval to build cellphone towers. So before you once again start blaming Apple and AT&T for delivering a shoddy product, remember to blame your local municipal government as well.
In a recent post on the popular tech site CNET news, an investigation was conducted into Jobs’ comments regarding the difficulty of establishing cellphone towers in cities like San Francisco and New York, and the results were surprising. It turns out that in cities such as these the process of applying for permission to build a new cellphone tower can take upwards of three (3) years!
The problem, it turns out, is that dense metropolitan areas deal with several factors that influence the addition of cellphone towers, and thus impact the improvement of cellphone service in these areas. First, most cities are concerned about aesthetics, and the fact is, cellphone towers are ugly and unsightly monstrosities. Most municipal governments are hesitant to approve cellphone tower construction because of the fear that it will appear as a stain on the city’s faade, ruining the dcor and beauty that city planners have worked so hard to create.
Second, even if permission was granted to build a cellphone tower, in cities where space is already at a premium it can be difficult to find a useful location. Sure it would be easy to build towers on the edges of communities and neighbourhoods, but they would be of little use in those areas.
While cities such as New York and San Francisco have offered alternatives, such as incorporating smaller cellphone towers (which are more like panels) onto the tops of existing structures (church steeples, building antennas, utility poles etc…) the problem with these sorts of cellphone panels is that there simply aren’t enough places to put them to deal with the high volume of metropolitan mobile traffic.
In the end, with so many barriers standing in the way of improving wireless coverage in many major America cities, one wonders how companies like AT&T can ever even hope to improve their networks enough to handle the traffic generated by increasingly powerful smartphones? But with that said, at least the next time your iPhone 4 drops that incredibly important call you’ll have one more place to direct your anger, right back at your municipal government.