Cell phone towers to provide full coverage
MINERAL COUNTY – Mineral County residents could be getting better cell phone reception in the future as one service provider has been making inroads on setting up more cell phone towers along the Interstate 90 corridor.
According to Mineral County Planner Tim Read, there has been a lot of interest on the part of Verizon on making sure cell phone service is uninterrupted along the highway. He said currently there are several spots where reception cuts out.
What county officials don’t know is when the company plans on putting the new towers up. Read said because Verizon and other cell phone providers use subcontractors to construct the towers, often local county officials have little information about the work.
“A factor that really complicates this for us is they always use a second and third party to check everything out,” Read said. “We don’t deal directly with Verizon. Verizon doesn’t deal with the county.”
Read said there was little information regarding where the towers will be built, how many will go up and when Verizon plans on doing the work.
The main reason county officials need more information from the companies wanting to do the work is to make sure they are building them in proper places according to regulations.
“The main thing they need to know is if there is any zoning that would prevent a cell tower from going in,” Read said. “I need to sign off on all the tower locations to make sure there are no zoning issues.”
The primary advantage of more towers is enhanced cell phone service for customers. The primary downside of the towers in the past has been their lack of aesthetic value. That won’t be a problem this time according to Read but that doesn’t mean the new towers will be totally without disadvantages.
“The towers will supposedly look like trees,” Read said. “But how many towers are we going to have in the county? How many will it take? And if they are abandoned at some point, who is responsible for dealing with them? Right now there are no county ordinances about requiring the companies to deal with them when they are no longer needed.”
Abandoned towers are a concern according to Read. He said his understanding was the providers may not need them at some point in the future. In the last few years, there has been an increased interest in putting up towers in Mineral County that may be unnecessary years from now.
“There is information out there that cell towers will be obsolete,” Read said. “They’re not going to be using cell towers. They will be using some other technology. There have been areas where the towers are simply abandoned. There’s no mechanism to tell the companies they have to take it down.”
It is unknown at this time how many towers will be built.