Silicon Valley Organizes to Patch Holes in Mobile Coverage

Joint Venture has a project involving AT&T, T-Mobile and local officials to plug the gaps. It plans to produce this year a primer on the problem for municipalities and by Q1 2008 a model ordinance to “streamline” handling of requests to install cell sites, Hancock said. Within six to 12 months, the group plans to transform into a full-blown Web site a page that outlines the problem and encourages visitors to report dead zones. The group is raising money to hire a full-time staffer on this matter, which could cost roughly $100,000 a year including benefits, Hancock said. The effort isn’t under wraps, but publicity seems to have been limited to Joint Venture’s Web site and a few other small sites.

Having Joint Venture and its business and local- government members, “as a trusted source that’s neutral,” out front fighting for new cell sites helps carriers dealing with city authorities, Hancock said. Jessica Prince, a Joint Venture team member from T-Mobile external affairs, said “having the support of the Joint Venture… shows that it not just the wireless carriers, but also community leaders who value a robust telecommunications infrastructure.”

But T-Mobile didn’t ask Joint Venture for help, said Rod De La Rosa, a zoning and compliance manager with the carrier and a member of Joint Venture’s team. The carrier heard about the project through Parsons Corp., which represents T- Mobile and other mobile providers on site permitting, he said. The carriers “did not solicit us,” Hancock concurred.

Joint Venture hasn’t gotten around to recruiting Verizon and Sprint Nextel to the effort, which began last year, Hancock said. Verizon’s and Sprint’s regional spokeswomen said they didn’t know about the project.

It’s not clear whether coverage is worse in Silicon Valley than in comparable places, Hancock said. The project is gathering data on that, he said.

But it’s clear that opposition to cell sites runs strong in some cities. A city hearing may draw 50 opponents, said Tasha Skinner, an urban planning specialist with Parsons, which represents T-Mobile and other mobile carriers in dealing with cities: “Specifically in Silicon Valley, they're there in force.” Skinner is one of two Parsons employees on the Joint Venture team.

“It is a NIMBY thing,” De La Rosa said of residents’ opposition. “They want the service, but they don’t want the cell sites.” And rich people are the biggest problem, Sprint’s spokeswoman said by e-mail: “We do sometimes face challenges in more affluent residential areas where we see local opposition to network build-out. In these cases, new wireless sites are vigorously opposed by some local residents who are very vocal… In the past we had to cancel the planned build-out of sites (even after they are budgeted and approved by Zoning) because residents opposed having a wireless site near their property.”

City governments vary widely in friendliness to cell sites, Skinner said. “Even in Silicon Valley, there are so many jurisdictions that have entirely different priorities as far as wireless coverage” goes, she said. Los Altos Hills, a wealthy residential suburb south of Palo Alto, has made “a tremendous effort to address their community’s concerns” about coverage, Skinner said. “They're an entirely different community than Hillsborough,” an older rich bedroom city nearer San Francisco. A former mayor of Los Altos Hills, now a council member, co-chairs the Joint Venture team. Other members are from San Jose, a smaller city, and the Valley’s largest county, Santa Clara.

The Valley predicament makes up in embarrassment and irony what it lacks in rarity. “We're the tech capital of the world,” Hancock said. “This is where we invent this stuff. But it doesn’t usually get developed here first. Asia is usually light years ahead.” European and Asian visitors complain about coverage not up to their standards, Joint Venture said. Hancock said he has had a call die while talking with the president of Stanford University.

Safety is at stake, as well as the convenience and on- the-go business dealings of residents and visitors, Hancock said. 911 use over cellphones has figured in emergencies large and small, he said.

Mobile carriers that more than hold their own with federal and state regulators and legislators often are stopped short at town hall, said Joint Venture participants. Their frustrations come at the hands not of some wide-ranging and coordinated opposition insurgency -- the Greenpeace or PETA of cell-site haters -- but of truly ad hoc and grassroots efforts by residents of individual cities, they said.

The objections are patently baseless, carriers and their allies said. They boil down to aesthetics and health. But cell sites can be hidden -- for instances, disguised as trees or hidden in steeples, gap-fighters said. Research has debunked fears of illness from radio-frequency radiation in mobile telephony, they said. But the suspicions persist.

Not all antennas can be hidden completely, said Jeff Cohn, whose company runs DeadCellZones.com, which collects and maps coverage complaints. Repeaters on the sides of buildings are hard to hide, he said.

City officials “play to the room, and the people who show up are usually the opponents” of new sites, Hancock said. Joint Venture is working to recruit people to change the balance, he said. T-Mobile, for one, takes sign-ups online for subscribers to volunteer to support its buildout. Web pages about nine cities including Silicon Valley’s Sunnyvale -- home to Yahoo, AMD, Juniper Networks and Palm -- “provide information about our siting activities and provide a way for folks to show their support for our efforts to improve wireless coverage in their neighborhoods,” Prince said.

Collocation of multiple carriers to reduce duplication of cell sites is complex and time-consuming, Hancock said. Joint Venture is working to simplify and speed it, he said.

In Northern California the past two years, AT&T has put $650 million into wireless service, adding 517 cell sites, a spokesman said Thursday. Verizon Wireless said that in 2006 it invested more than $715 million in California; since 2000, its outlays have exceeded $4 billion, a spokeswoman said. The companies said they couldn’t comment more specifically on Silicon Valley coverage right away, apart from referrals to coverage maps online. Sprint couldn’t provide us information right away.

No challenge seems too large or too small for the Joint Venture agenda. Its priorities range from turning a main drag into a grand boulevard to reversing climate change. Sponsors include 30 of the loosely defined region’s cities and towns, including San Jose, Palo Alto and Santa Clara. They extend north almost to the San Francisco airport on one side of the Bay and halfway to Oakland on the other, and south to the beach in Santa Cruz.

Corporate backers include pillars of the information and communications establishment like AT&T and Hewlett-Packard, upstarts such as Tropos Networks, and new titans Cisco and Google. Corporate-services professionals -- lawyers, bankers, accountants and consultants -- are represented strongly on the board, where they join university and health industry executives, tech executives and local government officials.