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eksith | 11 years ago
Take Google for instance. The biggest hurdles they had to deployment are the protective hurdles put in place by ISP friendly politicians. Some states have regulation in place that new deployments must reach last mile to virtually every resident, which is cost and time prohibitive when there's no profit initially. You have to bite the bullet and do the deployment as necessary, bend to the legal winds and bear the full cost (which, even for Google may be a bit high) with no guarantee of profit until years after deployment.
4G is a bit tricky as well since there are areas where you'll have little choice but to rent existing towers or build your own. In some places, the terrain gets in the way, so towers are fairly limited in what they can do. Then there are the issues with maintenance and safety for crews working on these towers, which cell providers don't seem to care much about http://www.propublica.org/article/cell-tower-fatalities
jsmthrowaway|11 years ago
Speaking as a former radio engineer, I was surprised ProPublica focused specifically on mobile phone providers there (I watched that Frontline special with interest, given my former line of work; I've been to many towers and have seen many memorials at their bases). Tower climbing even in traditional broadcast has long been known to be one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Most climbers freeclimb a significant majority of the tower and, honestly, I can understand why: safely climbing a tall tower without an elevator takes hours.
Jay Guilford is also a really bad example. To its credit, though, the documentary at least went into why, but oddly pushed blame back on the providers for his mistakes due to pressure. His was a weird citation when the message, which you clearly received and act upon, was cellular providers' negligence and attempts at liability minimization.