Cell Towers will be Every 400 to 500 Feet. Huge Impact on Roads. #CityofGaithersburg #DASAntenna #CrownCastle

This evening the City of Gaithersburg will be deciding what type of DAS Antennas to install on residential streets.  The City Council seems to have skipped the step where they actually evaluated the overall picture of what they were doing long term to their residential neighborhoods. 

For background on this issue, listen to the comment from George Brown, City of Jackson, Mississippi at a Conference on DAS Antennas/Small Cells in the video clip below. 

Mr. Brown comments that people have not looked at these proposals holistically to realize what all of these small cell towers will look like to a municipality.  Mr. Brown notes that small cells need to be deployed every 400 - 500 feet within a city by each vendor, and every vendor wants to be able to do the same thing, thus blanketing a city with DAS Antennas.

Between Sec. 704 (http://wireless.fcc.gov/fact1.pdf ), which requires local governments to not discriminate among all of the various providers of “personal wireless services, such as cellular, wide-area SMR and broadband PCS” such as in granting access to transmission locations, and the City of Gaithersburg likely hunger for revenue there will be a huge, unsightly and dangerous proliferation of roadside transmission poles and equipment if the City Council and Mayor do not take a step back now and understand the door that they are opening. 

Once a DAS Antenna is installed by one vendor, other vendors will follow.  Once in place, a DAS Antenna can get taller without any further review by the Council.  

As noted in this video, each time a vendor wants to install a DAS Antenna it requires that the road be dug up to install the underground cables necessary to connect the DAS Antennas.

In a previous post we noted that the City staff were recommending that stop signs be converted into cell towers.  Such a plan flies in the face of known road safety policy that has all stop signs made of material that will break away when hit by a car or truck. 

There are long term implications to opening up City of Gaithersburg residential streets to all cell vendors.  



City of Gaithersburg Zoning Ordinance section on Small Cells