You probably don't know the answer but what allows WiFi scanning anyway?

Not so much legal fees. The local cellular operators tend to hire real estate brokers and such to deal with the local governments. They're less expensive than lawyers and are more knowledgeable about local alternative sites, site rental fees, and property costs. Intentional delays that bordered on extortion became such a problem that the FCC was forced to require a time limit for acting on proposed sites new site and modifications.

It's not just municipal governments that slow things down. Local citizens groups that fear the proliferation of RF belching towers also create delays. For example, this is our local citizens groups: The Boulder Creek site was never built, but no because of the efforts of this group. It was due to the county demanding specific basic documents from the Verizon representative, which were not produced.

I has several discussions with the Verizon people about this site and others that were planned locally, which taught me a few things. For example, at the time, Verizon had about 1500 new sites in various stages of planning in Northern California. Most of these sites are not for new coverage, but are to increase bandwidth and capacity in areas that already have service. New sites require some minimum prospective user density to be considered worthwhile, which is a problem for areas with transient usage. For example, a rather large lake in the area has nearly zero cellular coverage, despite a large influx of cell phone users during the summer. Because the area is essentially empty during the remaining 9 months of the year, it's probably not going to be profitable investment.

Verizon also takes the path of least resistance. If there's any impediments caused by government or citizen groups and can't seem to be resolved, Verizon just moves on to another more hospitable area. The previously mentioned lake owners/operators offered to pay Verizon for installing a site to compensate for the limited revenue. I don't know if that worked.

Another expensive problem is camouflaged towers, which roughly doubles the cost of the tower. Yet another is the time involved in crafting local tower ordinances, no two of which are identical. I was involved in the passage of the Santa Cruz CA county tower ordinance, which in my never humble opinion was a giant mess. You really don't want to know what is involved in making sausage and tower ordinances. Incidentally, we were saved by the local coastal commission. They took our best efforts, cleaned it up dramatically, and actually produced a readable and workable ordinance. Other cities and counties often use the time needed to create such ordinance as a way of delaying the introduction of new towers.

If you want to slosh through the politics, reading back issues of AGL (Above Ground Level) magazine should be instructive:

I can go on forever on tower politics, but I'm already late for a lunch time meeting.

I have a couple tablets. My favorite is a 10" Irulu with an octacore processor. I have a case for it with a real keyboard, but it spends a lot of time on a stand, on top of my SFF dell computer. I can see the

24" monitor behind it as I stream the news, or another program while using the computer.

IRULU X1 Pro 10.1" Android 4.4 Tablet Octa Core 16GB/1GB HDMI 1024*600 /Keyboard and it was $106, delivered.

I have a pair of Kocaso MX780 7" tablets that I bought for $100. I carry one to appointments at the VA hospital, since I have about for hours to kill between the DAV shuttle runs. I have a 32 GB micro SD card with thousands of old books to read, and the Android app for Magic Jack to make calls when there is a free hotspot. The twin is a spare, in case the other is lost or damaged.

Depends on which country you are. In mine, there was a mandate by which each village must have at least one payphone, specially on small villages that do not have a phone per house. That is, if the company can not set a phone at each house that wants one, they must at least install one payphone (or more, depending on the population).

I don't know if that mandate is still valid.

As for mobile, I think there is another mandate that the dominant provider must provide service on every village. But I'm unsure.

Riding down the interstate today and saw a cell tower made to look like a tree. It seemed to be about 100 feet or more tall. The top 1/3 or so had some fake tree things on it to look like a pine tree. Real funny looking as it was about 50 feet or more taller than any trees around it.

It would have been less noticable if it had just the cell antennas on it instead of the fake tree top.

This is what AT&T (Cingular) installed when they were first forced to disguise a cell tower or monopole and had no clue what they were doing but had to build it in a hurry: I'll spare you the jokes about standing lumber trees.

People drove for considerable distances to see this abomination when it was first installed about 20(?) years ago. Incidentally, it's 90ft high. There was some official debate over the distinction between a genuine disguise monopine and an attractive nuisance. This created an awkward situation for AT&T, where modifying or rebuilding the tower might be construed as agreeing with their critics. So, it was left unchanged for a few years until the bad jokes died down. A water tank now sits on the location and a new cell site was built somewhere close, but further away from the nearby residential areas.

For additional disguise cell towers and associated stories, see:

Then, there's the giant cucumber tower:

Anything worth doing, is also worth over-doing:

I worked in CATV, Broadcast and Two way radios. The City of Middletown Ohio's first tower ordinance banned ALL towers, and outdoor antennas. No exemption for the local AM radio station, CATV headend, or even the police and fire departments. Their faulty reasoning was if no one had an antenna, everyone would have to pay for cable, and they would make more money off the franchise fees which were based on the number of customers.

In the early '80s St. Louis, MO sent our CATV manager an order to take down their tower and Sat dishes, for the same fool idea. St Lois was a real mess. They split the city into seven areas, and gave seven different companies a franchise. They also wanted to make cable customers pay a large fee to pay for the entire costs to operate the landfill, and all garbage collection, since watching TV was a 'luxury'.

We do things a little differently on the left coast. The county cell tower ordinance was inspired by the local drug dealers in about 2000. We have a rather large local amusement park. Nearby is a residential slum and ghetto. In the middle of this area, on top of a small hill, is a two story dilapidated building with a small market downstairs. It's also the exchange point for most of the local drug deals.

Two of the cellular providers decided that if they purged and disinfected the rooms above the market, it would make a good location for cell sites. They then applied to the city (not county). This information was eventually passed to the various drug dealers, who somehow (correctly) deduced that a cell site located in the middle of their stomping grounds could be used to accurately track their movements around the area. So, they organized a protest movement, which turned the first public hearing into a circus.

At this point, someone in city government decided that such things as tower ordinances was really the job of the county. Characteristically interested in more powers, the country agreed and decided to write the tower ordinance. A temporary summer intern was hired by the planning department to research and cut-n-paste an ordinance together out of pieces he found on the internet from multiple sources. At the end of summer he returned to his studies, leaving the county with an inconsistent and incoherent mess.

The only problem was that they didn't know that it was a mess until after the squabbling began. Every possible organization with an interest in cellular, towers, land use, aesthetics, historical preservation, electro biological effects of RF, and alien visitations became involved. The original drug dealers probably attended the initial planning department hearings, but were lost in the ever expanding circus atmosphere.

Unfortunately, I was volunteered to represent the interests of the local ham radio operators. Just one problem. I had recently survived some major surgery and still felt rather lousy. Sitting for hours in a crowded meeting room and lecturing morons on basic RF concepts did not seem very appealing.

After the first circus meeting, things settled down to business during the second meeting. Every group cut up its piece of the ordinance for special attention. Speakers of all types and abilities presented their case before the planning department board. There were the usual comedies, such as one lady who after denouncing cell phones as a health hazard, had her own cell phone ring while she was at the podium. Several speakers presented seriously erroneous technical information about RF. However, the real problem came from one of the planning department members, who decided to add cell site density and exposure limitations to the ordinance. Since nobody was interested, I decided that it was up to me to deal with the problem.

When my turn at the podium came, I presented the board with a simplified explanation about the relationship between transmit power, data bandwidth, and range. Any two can be traded for the third. If cellular radio was going to progress, it would need to increase the data bandwidth. Power was not going up because the batteries in the handsets would die too quickly. The obvious answer was more cell sites and denser concentrations of cell sites. Otherwise, the county was going to be locked into the technical backwaters of 2000. (It was also illegal for the county to pass such a technical requirement as that is the domain of the FCC, but I let county council tell them that). The density and exposure clauses were quietly dropped.

I was sitting next to someone who obviously was an attorney. We talked a little and I discovered he was there to represent AT&T. When I asked why he said nothing during the hearings, he answered that the important points would be settled after the ordinance is passed through the usual exemptions and amendments. He was right.

Several meetings later, an ordinance was hammered out that was sufficient to present to the board of supervisors. They did not want yet another public circus, so they rubber stamped it on the consent agenda. Nobody complained.

The next step was to pass it to the Coastal Commission, who's approval was required because many of the cell sites were within the coastal zone. What we got back was something that resembled bloodshed. There were so many red marks, corrections, changes, and re-writes on the various pages, that I barely recognized the ordinance. The Coastal Commission had passed it on to what I believe was someone with considerable experience in writing ordinances, who cleaned it up. I was impressed. The planning board and board of supervisors were less impressed, but accepted it anyway.

13.10.660 thru 13.10.668.

In the last 17 years, the ordinance has roughly doubled in size. Exemptions and exceptions are added regularly to deal with non-compliant technology and organizations. Life blunders on.

If adding a cell site in your neighborhood requires a tower ordinance, you have my sympathies.

We've got something like that here, looming over a small strip mall parking lot, but it looks more like a giant furry green corn dog.

The Watts Towers of telecom. To me, that's actually more esthetically pleasing than most of the attempts to disguise.

Back in the early to mid '90s, the standard albeit incorrect answer for "no cell phone use on airplanes" was that they would interfere with the operation of the airplane.

My question was, if that was true, why wasn't Mount Wilson a smoking crater for the amount of RF it poured out under the flight path.

First of all, they didn't say cell phones *would* interfere. They said they *Could* interfere. The transmitters on Mt Wilson are maintained by professionals. If one of those transmitters would suddenly start transmitting on an ATC or navaid frequency, they would figure it out and fix it quickly. Compare that to a few hundred people on an airliner each with their own little transmitter. If one of those devices malfunctions and is spewing harmonics, there is no quick way to find and resolve it. So, asking everyone to turn off their transmitters reduces the chances of an interference problem. Of course, some will forget and others refuse, but having 2 or 3 small transmitters on a plane rather than hundreds reduces the chances of an issue. You said "if that was true". Not only *was* it true back in the mid 90's. It *is* still true today. And, why do you want your phone wasting battery searching for usable cell sites during a long flight, anyway?

Hmmm. Looks like an overgrown cross between two percussion instruments: vibro-slap and tamborine (can't remember what the official one is called)...

Mike.

At least while fuselages were still made of metal, it should be more resistant to RF (and lightning) from outside than inside...

Mike.

Just off the interstate in South Carolina where everyone can see it is a water tower made to look like a peach.

When it was in its orange primer it looked like a giant butt sticking up. Even after the peach color was added it still looks like a butt.

Cell phones in airplanes don't work very well because the phone can see perhaps hundreds of cell sites simultaneously from the air causing handoff problems:

Patience. Your crater might arrive eventually. An LAX ATC tried by aiming a Boeing 777 Dreamliner at Mt Wilson in order to produce the required crater: Since that failed, it might be possible to attempt to burn it down again, once the trees and brush grow back:

The bottom line is that cell phone interference is unlikely, but still too much of a potential problem to risk a disaster. Better safe than sorry. Besides, I don't want to fly in an airplane full of people trying to yell over the engine noise into their cell phones.

I wonder why such things are not regulated from the highest level possibly in any country. Seems absurd to my that anything smaller than a state has to regulate towers.

ROTFL! X'-)

I can imagine :-)

I'm not going to speculate why, but the various parts of cell tower installation are divided between Federal, State, and local authorities by areas of influence. Anything that has to do with RF is owned by the FCC. Anything that has to do with aviation hazards, is run by the FAA and managed by the FCC. The FCC also deals with licenses, auctions, and protecting monopolies. If there are local public utilities commissions involved, then those are run by the State. Site selection, co-location, construction practices, aesthetics, compliance the local general plan, and taxing users, are handled by the local authorities (city and/or county).

It might be possible to consolidate all these into some kind of national personal communications bureaucracy, which would run things at all levels. To some extent, that's roughly what happened when the DHS (dept of homeland security) was established in 2001. I believe that might be what you're suggesting. Yes, it could be done, but do we really need yet another bureaucracy when the inefficient but tolerably effective existing tangle of overlapping agencies, departments, and boards are adequate? Sometimes, they need a kick in the posterior, as with the FCC imposing a "shot clock" to get things moving, but mostly, things lurch and blunder forward without bloodshed or additional taxes.

Also, the cellular industry basically started in about 1990 and is now only 27 years old. In another 15 years or so, we'll probably be overly connected at gigabit speeds going to work via virtual reality and traveling around via augmented reality. Creating yet another bureaucracy just to speed up the process doesn't seem like a great idea. We may even be communicating by telepathy via implants. Be patient. The future will arrive at the usual erratic pace quite nicely without faster regulations and additional bureaucracy.

I wasn't thinking only or specifically of the USA ;-)