It’s hard to miss the fact that 5G is coming. From online messaging to ads plastered across subway stations in cities across the U.S., the pitch for faster internet is here.
But it comes at a cost.
This year, our business team looked at how local governments are losing the power to regulate the infrastructure telecommunications companies want to provide.
We also dove into the bogus basis for net neutrality rules, the new tax law and how the noncompete clauses once reserved for executives are now being rolled out to workers in low-wage or middle-income jobs, making upward mobility more difficult.
More of our top business stories this year:
Small cells are the next generation of wireless technology that telecommunications firms and cell-tower builders want to place on streetlights and utility poles throughout neighborhoods nationwide. The small cells come with a host of equipment, including antennas, power supplies, electric meters, switches, cabling and boxes often strapped to the sides of poles. Some may have refrigerator-sized containers on the ground. And they will be placed about every 500 or so feet along residential streets and throughout business districts.
Telecom companies say the cells will be both unobtrusive and safe, and insist the technology is needed to bring faster internet speeds required by a more connected world. But residents like King and some wireless experts say the cells could reduce property values, pose safety risks and forever sully the appearance of cities — if not properly regulated.
Cities and counties like Montgomery figured they could put proposals for small cells through the usual zoning, permitting and citizen input processes that other cell towers and most brick-and-mortar proposals go through. But they may be mistaken. Politically connected telecommunications giants like Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc. and tower-operator Crown Castle International Inc. say that sort of local regulation isn’t appropriate for these sleeker, smaller cells, and they want to cut local governments’ say in the process. They contend they have the law on their side, but perhaps more important, they’ve got powerful friends in state capitols — and in the corridors of power in Washington.
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More in our 5G series:
Many local officials, engineers and wireless consultants contend that the changes Pai advocates won’t do anything to close the digital divide. What they will do, these critics charge, is increase profits for the wireless industry, which wants to cash in on a 5G market that is estimated to grow to $250 billion in annual service revenue in seven years.
In town halls and city council chambers across the country, local officials are facing the wrath of residents fearful of the next wave of wireless communications soon to sweep the nation.
They worry that the new technology — which will require hundreds of thousands of so-called small-cell antennas placed throughout neighborhoods — could cause adverse health effects because the antennas, located sometimes just a couple dozen feet from houses, will bathe their communities in round-the-clock radio frequencies.
Local governments don’t have any legal authority to block the deployment of the small cells based on health effects, and science on the subject is contradictory. But to soothe their constituents’ concerns, municipal officials are looking to Washington to do what it can: Update the federal government’s decades-old limit for safe exposure to radio waves so they can show residents they are following up-to-date safety guidelines.
Angry mayors and city council members have been waiting for such an assessment for five years now, and still aren’t sure when they’ll get it, if ever, or why it’s taking so long. The Federal Communications Commission, which determines the limits for safe radio-frequency exposure, says it is still working on the exposure limit and declined to provide a date for when it expects to release an updated standard. But the federal health agencies the FCC relies on to set a new standard say little-to-no research has been done.
For decades, Connecticut coasted fat and happy off defense firms, insurance companies, and a handful of super-rich financiers who came for the manicured lawns and to escape the higher taxes of neighboring New York and New Jersey. But the good times have ended, and Connecticut has been caught flat-footed.
Blue chip companies like General Electric have either left or are threatening to leave. A yawning budget deficit continues to loom over the state, amplified by some of the nation’s most glaring economic inequality. Greenwich, home to hedge funders and Manhattan corporate titans, and the Norman Rockwell suburbs of Westport, New Canaan and Darien share few priorities with Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport, gritty cities struggling with searing poverty and fiscal disaster. Connecticut’s political leaders must choose between what seem like equally rotten options:…
