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PlanWireless |
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Cities & Counties Cannot Plan by Radio Frequency Engineering Kreines & Kreines, Inc. has been in a multitude of public hearings where an RF engineer is called in to explain, "Why a tower is needed." We have heard every technical reason in the book plus a few that were invented on the spot. The first tower gets an endorsement from the RF engineer and the local government assumes that the RF engineer must know. The second tower in the same community gets another technical reason. The third tower in a community is needed to fill a gap between the other two. For each new tower application, there is a new RF engineering reason. Kreines & Kreines, Inc. has received four requests for proposals (RFPs) recently, two from the Eastern time zone, one from the Central time zone and one from the Pacific time zone. All of them regard radio frequency (RF) engineering as a discipline to be used to determine "need" each time an application for a personal wireless service facility is applied for. RF Engineering is a Design Discipline, Not a Planning ToolIndividual wireless carriers use RF engineering to design their cell sites. Such design is controlled by the licensed carrier's desire for maximum return-on-investment. Tower builders, on the other hand, would not logically use RF engineering to design for the individual carrier's concerns. A tower builder wants a site on which all users can co-locate. One carrier's needs may not be another carrier's needs and, in fact, different technologies and business plans guarantee that each carrier is intent on filling a different "gap," "hole" or "dead zone." Yet when a tower builder submits an application with the first carrier, invariably that first carrier's "coverage needs" are used to justify the "tower." Wake up, local governments! The tower builder plans on having several tenants, and they all will have different coverage needs. The first tenant's RF engineering is used only to get the tower approved. Once the tower builder has vertical real estate, the tower builder's next step is to build another tower somewhere else. Some towers built for speculation don't even have a single wireless carrier on them. The point is: co-location and wireless deployment are not the tower building company's business, so RF engineering is merely used to justify vertical real estate. So, when an RF engineer represents a tower building company at a public hearing and the RF engineer says, "We've got to put a new tower here; we can't go on that existing tower over there," who's kidding whom? The RF engineer may be right about the first carrier. But if your community is approving a tower for many carriers, what good does it do to know only what the first carrier needs? And hiring another RF engineer won't do any good. That engineer doesn't know what the second, third and fourth carriers are going to need either. If your community wants to approve a tower for several users, your community should not rely on RF engineering, but should rather start relying on planning and zoning. |
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