This morning I attended the quarterly meeting of the Carolina Wireless Association in Charlotte.  Rob Dawson, Vice-President of TESSCO Technologies, gave a fast-paced presentation on the impact of wireless communication on the existing telecommunications infrastructure.  The following bullet points are from my notes taken during Mr. Dawson’s presentation:

• The US population is 300 million and there are already 280 million wireless subscribers
• In December 1995, wireless data did not exist.  In 2009, there are now 55 billion text messages per month.
• In 2007 there were 110 billion texts sent in the US; one trillion texts sent in the US in 2008; and 2.5 trillion texts this year (2009)
• Existing networks are not designed to handle this.
• There were approximately 225,000 towers in 2008.  We are running out of easy places to put them.
• Since 2005 more people were able to access the Internet by mobile wireless broadband than land line.
• AT&T is spending billions to upgrade markets to deal with wireless demand from such things as IPhones and its applications and downloads, all of which push and pull data through the network.  Also included in this wireless explosion are GPS navigation devices and machine to machine connections that increase traffic across the network.
• Much more capacity on the network is needed.
• From 2005 to 2012, mobile traffic will have increased 1000 fold.
• Two megatrends are driving growth:  (1) mobile data networks; and (2) the switch from home systems to handheld
• 3G networks were meant to handle only so much traffic.
• More “spectrum” equals more capacity.
• By 2020 or sooner, mobile devices will be the primary connection to the Internet.

Commentary:  The first time I handled a zoning approval for a communications tower, the users were citizens who owned what were commonly referred to as car phones, mobile units that were mounted permanently to the dash or console.  Car phones were used only by professionals who needed them or by the wealthy.  The day when middle school teens and grandmothers at church socials would whip out their handheld cell phone had not arrived.  Each tower was especially controversial and few citizens understood that times were permanently and radically changing. 

Today, our world has become irretrievably wireless.  When I represent companies constructing communication towers I seldom have to explain why the network is needed.  Fifteen years ago it was the tower that was perceived as evil.  In 2009, unless you live directly under or adjacent to a planned tower, the only thing that is abhorrent to the public is a dead spot where calls are dropped.

From a legal perspective, most telecommunications ordinances were written in the middle to late nineties to address the coming wave of towers that citizens increasingly wanted in the abstract but not in their neighborhood.  Most of those ordinances are outdated, in that they pre-date many of today’s stealthing techniques, they don’t distinguish between carriers and tower builders, and they don’t accommodate the requirements of North Carolina’s relatively new telecommunications statutes.