You’ve heard the telecommunications revolution is poised to change your life. What you may not realize is how much it could change your neighborhood.
San Francisco Bay area communities, from Napa to San Jose, are among the nation’s testing grounds for a new generation of technologies expected to bring untold benefits–and untold amounts of unsightly apparatus to sidewalks, roof tops, even front yards.
We’re not talking equipment on every lawn, but it will be virtually impossible to walk down the street without confronting the changes.
In years past, when a new technology such as cable would surface, the transmission hardware was usually placed underground or strung between existing utility poles that — ugly though they may be — are an accepted part of the residential landscape.
The first encroachment came from cellular antenna towers.
Now, with the federal government’s decision to deregulate much of the telecommunications industry, many neighborhoods will shortly be looking at an explosion of roof antennas, satellite dishes and other above-ground transmission stations needed for wire and wireless communications.
The information highway is emerging as the information sky way.
“The new telecommunications bill is going to create a lot of new services that will lead to the proliferation of various types of antennas in everybody’s neighborhood. Antennas are going up in the malls, in movie theaters, in stadiums, wherever people walk a lot and drive a lot,” said Palo Alto communications consultant Michael Killen.
“Every city should have rules and regulations to protect the environment from obtrusiveness.”
Communications executives say experience has taught them the fears are only temporary.
“When people get past the initial `Oh, gee, I’m a little uncertain and afraid of this thing’ and they get to the reality, it really isn’t any kind of problem,” said Steve Harris, Pacific Bell’s vice president of external affairs.
“After it’s new, it’s old. It blends into the environment and people don’t see it and think about it anymore.”
Nevertheless, some cities are waking up to the brave new world and not liking what they see.
San Jose, which balked last year at Pacific Bell’s 6-by-5-by-2-foot fiber-optic connection boxes, now is delaying the company’s plans to install 5-foot-tall antennas at 52 sites around the city.
When that network is completed, it will serve as the backbone for Pacific Bell’s “personal communications services,” essentially a new-generation portable device that will route calls to people instead of places.
In nearby Saratoga, fallout over placement of a more conventional cellular antenna by GTE Mobilnet and Cellular One led officials to impose a moratorium on all antenna installations until a master policy can be written.
For now, communications companies are responding with a common threat: If cities impose too many onerous restrictions, they will go elsewhere.
Delivering on its rhetoric, Pacific Bell just closed up shop on its Los Angeles fiber-optic network, abandoning a near-$100 million effort when the city held up construction permits.
Bay Area residents still will probably be among the first in the nation to get interactive television and the single phone number that can follow you anywhere, but growing revolts have at least delayed the introduction of some key new services.
Futurists predict clashes over the aesthetics of the telecommunications revolution will only increase as the novelty wears thin.
“At first there is less resistance to the trencher coming down the street and ugly satellites on the roof of the house; more attention paid to function than form,” said Watts Wacker, who holds the title “resident futurist” at Menlo Park’s SRI International.
“But change has accelerated to a degree that the window where people will accept that won’t last very long,” Wacker said. “The (companies) better be getting to your house quickly.”
Even now, people are concerned.
“They told us they were coming,” said Nell Aiello, describing the arrival of Pac Bell’s fiber-optic network in her Willow Glen neighborhood.
“But what really didn’t come across was how intrusive they were going to be. They dug up people’s lawns and bushes, and they killed my rose bush.”
Aiello felt better after the company planted a new bush.
“We’re demanding these services so we can have the increased technology available to us in our homes and we don’t have to make a trip in to work,” said Tiralisa Kaplow, a neighborhood leader who is helping the city evaluate the new equipment.
“But we need to balance that with the quality of life. I worry about the visual impact and noise levels.”
Those critiques arise just from the few systems now in place. There are also a spate of evolving technologies, some involving satellites.
Although miniaturization will reduce some of the impact–backyard satellite dishes are now just the size of a pizza–the nature of competition worries some urban planners.
“The companies are in such an incredible drive to compete with each other to get in the ground or in the air or wherever first. The revolution in this is going to be kind of wild,” said San Jose planning chief Gary Schoennauer, who is grappling with how to control the propagation of equipment.
Example: At the same time Pac Bell and Sprint are interested in installing personal communications services antennas, existing cellular companies are trying to compete by adding more of their antennas.
According to some estimates, the result will be at least three times the number of voice and data antenna sites currently in the South Bay.
To the telecommunications industry, these concerns smack of overreaction.
“Neighbors should control what goes in their neighborhood,” said Seth Buechley, vice president of Cord Communications, which erects antennas throughout the Bay Area.
“But we are talking about an antenna on the roof. I can tell you Saratogans would be the first to complain if they couldn’t make calls from their cellular phones.”
After some major public relations gaffes, several companies, Pac Bell among them, have been considering new approaches to locating ugly equipment.
Stopped in its fiber-optic tracks last summer when San Jose residents came home to find trenches in their streets and front yards, Pac Bell launched a massive information effort, complete with letters to residents and neighborhood meetings.
It now is proceeding with the next 92 node cabinets, with little so far in the way of complaints.
