Telecom Trends

How to go Mark – couldn’t have said it better. It’s pretty obvious to everyone, except Toronto Council and their supportive bureaucrats, that the world is going wireless. Increasingly, people are abandoning their traditional landline phones for their cell phones, more and more business is done and transacted over wireless facilities and games, music and movies are being downloaded to cell phones.

Handset manufacturers are producing products with increasing capabilities in response to the growing demands of consumers. These services are, in turn, increasingly dependent on crystal clear, high speed, reliable, broadband-type signals and connections. Such quality of service is only possible if there is enough infrastructure (towers and antennae) in place to ensure complete blanket coverage of a geographical area.

In order to keep up with the demand for more sophisticated services, cell phone companies in both Canada and the U.S. will be, and are, bidding billions of dollars to acquire the spectrum needed to respond to a demanding and increasing body of consumers.

So what would the City of Toronto does the City of Toronto want do in response to this reality, if it had its way? It would restrict the location of towers and limit their height. And why? Simply because a few NIMBY activists don’t want the infrastructure needed to deliver the kinds of high quality and 100% reliable services they want and use located in their neighbourhoods.

The bottom line impact of the kind of restrictions the City and the “say ‘no’ councilors who dominate Council want is that those clear, reliable, high speed services won’t be available everywhere in the City. One has to wonder what one of those NIMBYs will do when they lose a connection to an important business or personal call while driving around the City. They’ll probably call their service provider and complain without even realizing they are the cause of the problem.

Wireless transmission towers are, and will be, as much a part of today’s and tomorrow’s realities as those telephone poles that run up and down many of the streets in the City were years ago. As to the health impacts of the transmissions, there is no concrete proof that they do, or do not, have a negative impact on humans. Just think where our world would be if we had held up every new technology because of a suspected health impact.

The City prides itself on how many lists it gets on that indicate it’s a top-notch, with-it, place to live, work and do business. One emerging, if not de facto, measure of being such a community is the quality, range and reliability of wireless services available. Unless the City takes a different approach, one that is more telecom friendly, its reputation is going to suffer. If Toronto becomes known as a place where wireless services are limited and unreliable, will people want to come to the City as tourists or to attend conventions? As you have correctly noted, in the past and currently, the City has not been, and is not, that friendly when telcos and cablecos want to lay fibre in or across City-owned rights-of-way.

Rather than regulating and saying “no”, the City should sit down with the service providers and talk to them with a view to leveraging their approval against services the City uses or needs and how much it pays for them or, as you say, offer up City-owned sites as alternatives.

Councilors and the Mayor have to rise up above the urge to react in a knee-jerk fashion every time a few citizens or a community group yells “wolf” and take a look at the potential impact that reaction will have on the City as a whole before acting. If they don’t, the City is going to go nowhere and will continue to wallow in mediocrity.

It’s nice to know that Industry Canada has the ultimate authority in approving the location of cell phone transmission facilities in the City and across the country. At least they can bring a big-picture, balanced and rational perspective to the table.