Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Dressing Up Cell Towers

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 14:31:16 -0500

Dressing Up Cell Towers

Video :http://www.techtv.com/news/scitech/story/0,24195,3419278,00.html

Cellular antennas are downright ugly. Thanks to one company, though, that could all
change.

By Jim Goldman, Tech Live Silicon Valley Bureau chief

Think of The Larson Company as a kind of Johnny Appleseed for the wireless set.

Just as Johnny -- the classic American literary figure -- traveled the countryside
planting
apple trees, The Larson Company travels the countryside planting aesthetically pleasing
antennas used for wireless communications. Tonight on "Tech Live," we'll show you how the
company does it.

"We specialize in concealing wireless antenna bay stations," says a proud Steve Meyer, the

company's vice president for business development.

Larson, known for its amusement park attraction designs (the company created some of the
reefs inside the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium), has created an entire business
around hiding big, gray, boxy, wireless antennas inside fake trees.

Taking back the outdoors

The company says it's restoring the landscape, putting the "great" back in "the great
outdoors."

"If they see a tree out of the corner of their eye, they're not gonna take a second pass
at it,"
Meyer says. "That's really the person we're trying to convince."

The company hides antennas in all kinds of places: rock formations, church steeples,
saguaro cactuses, even a 90-foot grain silo near a shopping mall outside Chicago.

The various trees, including palms, figs, and pines, are created leaf by leaf, needle by
needle, inside a computer. Designers use AutoCAD to wire-frame every part of the tree,
taking into account where the antenna's panels are and where the branches will go, and
making sure leaves and branches don't interfere with RF signal transmission.

The designs are then turned into giant molds that ultimately shape the trees, which can
cost
up to $100,000. Chimneys, boulders, and other decorative antennas run as little as
$12,000.

Depending on the kind of tower, they could cost about twice as much as a normal,
uncamouflaged tower could cost. But even that's a small price to pay to get the tower in
and
generating revenue vs. not having the tower at all. Wireless carriers don't seem reluctant
to
pay the added costs.

The entire process of building the trees takes about eight to 10 weeks. So far, Larson has

built and installed nearly 300 "adorned" cell towers nationwide. The company has worked
with Cingular, Sprint, Nextel, AT&T, Verizon, and Voicestream (now T-Mobile).

NIMBY killers

"The number of cellular antenna stations being deployed is growing, and they're moving
into
residential areas," Meyer says. "People are unfamiliar with how they look, and at times
people consider them unsightly, and I think that's where the demand is coming from."

Scott Ellison, program director of wireless communications for IDC, a high tech
consultancy,
agrees that community opposition plays a key role in Larson's business plan. "A cellphone
tower is typically not a very attractive thing in and of itself," he says. "You often run
into
community opposition when you try and place a new cellphone tower in a community."

And that unattractive quality can be all a neighborhood needs to keep out the antennas.

"One of the major ways that a town can deny an antenna permit application is because of
aesthetic appeal or property values," says Libby Kelley, executive director of the Council
on
Wireless Technology Impacts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the safe use of
electromagnetic radiation.

Despite this opposition, there are more than 100,000 commercial cell towers in the United
States, with several thousand more being added every year. And growth shows no sign of
slowing, according to research group IDC.

With Larson's trees being "planted" all over the nation, chances are you've seen one. But
if
the company's doing its job, you may not have realized what you were seeing.

Originally posted February 27, 2003

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