Rural Infrastructure and Technology, or why cellphone towers and their ilk don't bother me
Rural Infrastructure and Technology, or why cellphone towers and their ilk don't bother me
If you drive far enough down most any county route in north-central Florida you'll notice, as if a video on constant replay, a variety of sights that seem to appear and then re-appear time and again. Dairy farms, patches of uncleared woods, country churches, graveyards, and in the midst of this pastoral landscape also the more technological aspects of cellphone, radio, and microwave towers. The latter items are ones that few observers of the rural landscape seem to admire as we do the traditional barn or church with its charm of bygone years, yet the barn, church, or farmhouse were built out of need as much as for their beauty and the cellphone tower also was erected due to a very real need. Radiotelecommunications rely on, expectedly, devices for the propagation of signals and to transmit such signals any real distance, the transmitters need to be perched as high in the air as possible. Microwave transmitters, a technology that is becoming less common due to other systems such as fibre-optics, work a little differently in that they follow what is known as a line-of-sight propagation program, or in other words, require a clear an unobstructed path from point-A to point-B to communicate between towers. This is why from the 1950s to the 1990s you found these towers, most often painted red and white to warn aircraft of their locations, in rural areas spaced even distances from one and another. Today, many of these microwave relays no longer continue their original work of communicating telecommunications traffic via line-of-sight microwave signal tranmission but now are adapted as cellphone relay towers. Some have had their tell-tale microwave cones removed from them while others have allowed them to remain beside their new telephony arrays.
Had cellphones and their supporting technology never come to the forefront as an important part of private telecommunications as they have, it is hard to tell what fate would have awaited those microwave towers. I suspect many would have been left in situ to rust and weather for years as the expense of their removal would simply have been too great to encourage any other solution. As it is, they offer a good choice of an extant structure for cellphone companies to extend their rural coverage. In some locales, when constructing brand-new cellphone towers, there has been an effort to disguise these towers as palm trees or other natural features of the landscape, but most such ideas were better on the drawing board than in real life and wind up producing embarassing structures that certainly do not look natural and often are amusing at best and plain ugly at worst. To me, there is little need to cover up cellphone relay towers: we all rely on our cellphones and they are a great device, an invention that especially for those of us who live in rural areas allow for greater freedom and communication. The small unit you hold in your hand depends on an extensive switching network which in turn requires towers and while not perhaps the most beautiful of all structures, the architectural engineering of telephony towers is something I have much come to admire. To survive Floridian thunderstorms and wind, to say nothing of possibly hurricanes, cellphone towers (like the radio and television propagation towers before them) require grand feats of structural engineering, although, at the least, we do not have ice to contend with in Florida much and ice is historically the greatest foe of large guyed (wire-supported) towers. In northern climates, extensive icing on guy-wires has been a common culprit of failed towers as the ice can add weight to the wires and, in some cases, cause catastropic failures.
Out of the variety of tall towers that dot our rural landscape, the radio and televison broadcast towers are the tallest and have been in place the longest as a typology while the cellphone towers are the newest additions. Microwave relay towers are probably the least understood by the general public though most people probably know that these facilities have something to do with telephone communications at the least. Have you ever noticed the local central office for the telephone company in your town? If you live in Gainesville, this is located downtown off of University Avenue. You can find it rather easily due to, yes, its large microwave relay tower-a tall metal structure atop the main building, as awkward as a teenage track star and painted all white and red to warn aircraft of its skyward location. Like many of its kind, this massive structure has now been employed as a host for a cellphone transmission antennae array. The central office down below houses the various switches and computing mechanisms essential for routing telephonic communications. I've always loved central offices: they are an aspect that is crucial to communication via phone, and now internet, and yet they are often overlooked by all except those who work with phone systems. Few people seem even aware of their presence despite the fact they're often located right smack dab in the middle of downtown. I am a bit of a geek about them too: whenever I am in a different city, I want to see the central office, or at least where it is located and how its designed. The architecture of central offices is itself something I could probably write a whole article about, really. A few years ago I was in Augusta, Georgia, with a friend and annoyed him to no end about seeing the central office there before we could go to dinner. I know where the ones for Lake City and Jacksonville are, but Orlando's has somehow evaded me: possibly having been either swallowed by a sinkhole or, knowing Orlando, stolen in the night.
Some of these microwave towers also played a very important role in plans for surviving nuclear attack during the Cold War: had the Soviets attacked us and normal telephony communications were out, a group of select microwave relays within AT&T's Long Lines network near Washington, D.C., would have in theory allowed the president and other high-ranking officials to communicate with the military. Of course, even when somewhat protected and hardend, these towers were the type of facilities that would be rather easy for the Soviets to have also destroyed, though many were designed to survive even indirect nuclear blasts and the concept always was that a nuclear attack by Russia would be launched from afar and would not involve an immediate follow-up by aircraft capable of attack these towers. The men and women who worked on the Long Lines project and the technology they pioneered are today a little-known yet very essential part of our nation's Cold War history and should be remembered. When we think of how much of our communications are carried daily in one way or another via voice or data lines by the phone companies, the importance of having secure back-up systems like this is obvious.
Given how useful and even essential microwave towers have been for our national communications infrastructure, I do not view them as a blight on the landscape: instead, I see them as markers of progress, as beacons of how in the past fifty years or so our nation has grown into one of the most technologically-advanced ones in the world and how we have been a leader and innovator in terms of how to employ effective, inexpensive, solutions to bringing cutting-edge communications to most every American. Back in 1998, who would have expected us to all have cellphone by 2008? At one time, the cellphone was the toy of the rich and tool of business whereas now it's an integral part of family communications. So you had need not bother disguising your cellphone towers, let them stand and remind us of their importance. Much of what we now treasure in the non-natural rural landscape such as silos, barns, fences and other venacular architecture actually comes out of very pragmatic origins and cellphone and other
communications towers also come from such a trajectory, only they are doing the business of telecommunications instead of agriculture.
MIKE WALKER is a journalist and writer based in Gainesville, Florida. He covers history, ecology, politics and other issues for this and other news media. He may be reached via email with comments at: cloudrace@prontomail.com
