School Cell Towers: Why RFP's Don't Work
Steel in the Air, Inc. regularly assists schools with cell tower leases on school district property. We represent schools and universities who see the upside of income that doesn't require a budget meeting or tax increases to procure. With the downturn in property tax valuations and increasing budgetary restraints, more and more schools are evaluating school cell towers as a source of income.
Recently, we went and spoke to a particular school board in south Florida as a member of the public in response to their consideration of the possibility of leasing school district property to cellular providers. Our particular objection to their proposed plan was that they intended to simply issue an Request for Proposals "RFP" in hopes that multiple parties would bid on the exclusive right to place towers on school district property. We objected to this option because we felt that it limits the value that the District procures from cell tower leases on school property. The District was looking to minimize the impact on its day to day operations by going with a single source vendor who would build, own, and operate the towers. They would evaluate District property and assist the District in marketing the property to wireless carriers. If they found interest, they would develop and pay for the cell tower on school land and manage it. In return, they split the revenue with the school district 50/50.
On the surface, this may seem like a good option. There are surely benefits to this type of plan.
- The District and the tower company's goals are typically aligned in that the tower company needs tenants if it intends to be profitable.
- The District gets to offload the negotiation of lease agreements to a third party vendor thereby decreasing staff time on the projects. (As anyone who regular negotiates leases on school district property knows- these are time consuming leases).
- The District gets a sizable amount of income- especially in more urban areas or in areas where
However, there are some potential issues with this type of plan for school cell towers.
- 50% of the revenue can be substantially less than the District would have received had it just negotiated the lease directly with the wireless carrier.
- In some cases, it is unlikely that more than one wireless carrier will use a particular location. As the tower company only gets 50% that may not be enough to justify building the tower. As such, the District forgoes whatever revenue it could have negotiated directly for the lease.
- The District can give up some of its control over the placement of towers on its own property.
- Some districts have experienced significant public opposition to cell towers on school property on the basis of the sometimes irrational concerns about radio frequency radiation.
- Despite some common goals, the tower company and the District will inevitably have different goals because the tower company exists solely to make money off the operation of the towers.
The biggest issue we had with this particular District is that they assumed that an RFP would effectively bring in bidders. However, what they don't know is that the way they intend to craft the RFP will limit the number of bidders. The large tower companies don't do 50% revenue sharing. There are some tower companies that would be interested in building cell towers at schools, but they aren't likely to see the RFP. The wireless carriers won't bid because they would simply prefer to let a tower company deal with the burden and cost. The District is unlikely to know how to find small tower companies who aren't likely to read or follow school district RFPs. So the District constituents get the short end of the stick because the RFP ends up being bid on by one or two companies. To make matters worse, these bidders almost always know that RFP's for school sites will only be bid on by one or two companies and therefore aren't forced to bid competitively.
Our suggestion is that school districts retain outside experts to assist them in determining the most profitable way of leasing space for school cell towers. We can review the District's goals and help guide you on the method that will maximize your revenue while minimizing the headache to the district. It might be that one vendor is suitable or perhaps multiple vendors. Alternatively, perhaps the District could consider building and owning the towers themselves. Please contact us if you are school district looking to increase its revenue while minimizing the administrative burden from dealing with the wireless providers. We can provide non-biased advice on how best to accomplish BOTH of these goals. Please also see our webpage on municipalities building their own towers.
Labels: cell towers, municipality, school cell tower
Cell Tower and Cell Site Location Data: A Primer
In reviewing some online commentary about cell tower location data on various forums and websites purporting to offer free cell tower location data, I thought it might be helpful to explain what is available and what is not available to individuals looking for cell tower and cell site locations.
CELL SITE VS CELL TOWER
Many people make the mistake of comparing “cell sites” and “cell towers”. I regularly receive inquiries from people who say they have a “cell tower” on their roof. What they actually mean to say with rare exception is that they have a “cell site” or cellular antenna site on their rooftop. A “cell site” is simply the antenna installation. A “cell tower” is the support structure upon which a single or multiple “cell sites” are installed. “Cell sites” can also be installed on rooftops, water towers, billboards, signs, hillsides, ect. (In rare cases, there are cell towers installed on top of rooftops.)
In the industry, we divide cell sites into three categories:
1. Rawland: A proposed site for a new tower which will accommodate multiple “cell sites” or “collocations”.
2.
Collocations: The installation of a single carrier’s equipment and antennae on an existing tower.
3.
Tenant Improvements: The improvement of an existing structure other than a tower. This can be a water tower, a building rooftop installation, or any other non-tower structure.
It is difficult to estimate the number of cell sites in existence. In a few previous posts, we have indicated the number of cell towers owned by the
top 20 towers companies (as ranked by RCR who does a yearly informal and somewhat inaccurate poll), our article on estimates of the
total number of cell sites owned by each carrier, and
estimates of the number of towers owned by each wireless carrier.
COMPLETENESS OF TOWER DATA
To start with, there are no comprehensive tower databases that I am aware of, including Steel in the Air’s. We are contacted on a weekly basis by individuals looking to procure “cell tower” data. However, most of these people are actually looking for “cell site” data. They don’t need to know where towers are but instead want to know where each carrier has their sites. There are multiple reasons why they want to know:
1.
Location Based Services (LBS): The wireless carriers are required by the FCC to be able to
Enhanced 911 (e911) services for wireless devices which enables emergency providers to locate cellular handsets with a moderate degree of accuracy. Many entrepreneurs desire to use “cell site” locations and coordinates to establish locations for their wireless service. From the location of an individual cellular provider’s cell towers and cell sites, these entrepreneurs intend to triangulate their service’s user’s locations. Unfortunately, we are not aware of any commercially available service whereby this data can be purchased or is otherwise available except through from each individual carrier.
2.
Comparison of Coverage: End users often want to know how strong the signal from a respective tower is in a given area. The carrier’s online coverage maps in some cases show strength of service to varying degrees but they rarely show specific locations for towers. And for those carriers that do show tower locations, they always only show those towers that they own that are available for collocation. In other words, they don’t show every “cell site”. In most cases, the towers shown only represent 20% or less of their complete network “cell sites”. Alternatively, some individuals with cell tower ground leases are looking to see whether a recent threat to renegotiate their
AT&T/Cingular cell tower lease or
Sprint/Nextel cell tower lease are predicated by the existance of other cell sites in the vicinity.
3.
Competitive Cell Tower Location Data: Many of our clients are actually tower companies who need a competitive advantage in knowing what towers are in an area that they intend to either acquire or build a tower. While many smaller local tower companies can simply send someone to drive the area, when you are dealing with the acquisition of 500 towers, it is not feasible. To that end, we have consolidated 65,000 actual tower locations from numerous tower companies, wireless carriers, and government sources. Combined with the FCC data, that represents 125,000 actual towers. Some of these are publicly available, some are not. And unlike our competitors who provide listing services for anyone with a piece of property who wants a tower on it, when we suggest that a tower exists at a particular location, you are very unlikely to find a vacant piece of land that some realtor listed to get a cell tower lease.
4.
Backhaul Alternatives: We are regularly contacted by entities that either own optical fiber rings or ones that are considering purchasing dark fiber to compare the location of fiber to the presence of cell towers and cell sites. These entities wish to determine where they can augment their income to provide backhaul services to wireless sites.
PUBLICLY AVAILABLE DATA
Many of the available online sources of tower data simply regurgitate the records available from the FCC. Please note that there is no requirement by the FCC or any other government agency to register individual “cell sites”. Cellular service is licensed by the region, meaning that the FCC grants the wireless carriers a general license for a county or other geographic region. As long as they conform to the frequency and power limitations of these licenses, they can build anywhere (with local zoning approval).
There are numerous types of data available from the FCC for antenna sites. However, these online sources do not distinguish between what the datasets provide. This appears to create a good deal of confusion between users. Below are some of the datasets provided by the FCC.
1.
Antenna Structure Registrations. (ASR) Many of the free online sites for tower data use this as the base data. (Antenna Search.com, Cell Reception.com) Antenna Structure Registration is required by the FCC for those tower sites that pose a threat to air safety. In short, this means towers that are over 200’ tall or those towers that are within 5 miles of an airport. Accordingly, if a tower is under 200’ and is not within 5 miles of an airport, it does not have to be registered with the FCC. (For a indication of how many towers exceed 200' tall- see our previous post on
cell tower heights.) It is important to note that ASRs are only necessary for towers- not cell sites. Oftentimes, the owner of the antenna structure or “cell tower” is not the wireless carrier, it is a tower company who built the tower or a tower aggregator like American Tower or Crown Castle who purchased the tower sites from the wireless carriers. To complicate matters, many of the FCC ASRs are not actually used for cellular communications. They can be two way radio towers or broadcast towers or other wireless internet service towers. There are approximately 110,000 antenna structure registrations.
2. Specific Frequency Licensed Locations. The FCC does require some wireless services to register individual locations. There are numerous databases available from the FCC on different wireless service types. For instance, most microwave installations require specific site registrations. Paging and mobile radio installations do as well. Some of the online services purporting to provide data about cell towers actually use the frequency databases. Unfortunately, these locations rarely equate to cellular towers or “cell sites”. So someone viewing these databases will end up paying for what they presume to be cell tower data and in reality they are paying for paging locations or two-way radio locations. (or even Ham Radio).
In essence, if you use the free services that regurgitate the FCC data, recognize that you are getting what you paid for. I personally would not waste my money on any service that offers to sell you the FCC data. (It is available for free from other online sites and can be downloaded from the FCC website for free, although the translation of the database is not simple.)
STEEL IN THE AIR DATA
We have assembled a comprehensive database of tower and cell site locations from numerous sources, including the public FCC data, FAA data, and tower companies that provide their data online. We also have represented over 1000 clients with cell site leases for a few thousand cell sites. For many of those clients, they helped fill in missing data in their area by driving around. In addition, we have independently gathered specific cell site from various sources including paying people to literally drive areas of interest and visually identify towers. Some of our data includes lease rate data, most of it doesn’t. We use our data to assist our clients with determining where cell sites are. In a number of cases, we don’t have complete cell site data for an area. However, we know how to “fill in the holes” and how to assess areas for existing cell sites. In short, we make it our business to collect cell tower and cell site data and create tower location maps. We don’t simply regurgitate free government data.
Labels: cell sites, cell tower locations, cell towers, Rooftop cell sites, tower maps
Cell Tower Heights Across the US
One of our clients contacted us to inquire about the average heights of cell towers. We did a quick analysis of the FCC tower data and came up with the following chart which shows the height of the cell tower (horizontal axis) vs the number of towers of that height (vertical axis). We thought we would share the chart as it presents an interesting visual on cell tower height.
Please note that this chart may not be indicative of the height distribution of all cell towers because the FCC did not always require registration of cell towers under 200'.
Labels: cell towers
Think there are too many cell towers in the US?
I read a fascinating article about the
increase in the number of cell phone towers in India. According to this article in the Economic Times- there are currently 110,000 cell phone towers in India currently - however, there will be
90,000 added for 2007 and another
90,000 added for 2008. Compare this with the 180,000 or so cell phone towers in the United States currently, and the 15,000 to 20,000 that will be added each year in 2007 to 2008.
To put this in perspective, the US is 3.5 million square miles- while India is only 1.25 million square miles. Yet the population of India is 1.1 billion people- in the US, 330 million. (from wikipedia) 3 times the people, 1/3 of the land mass.
No wonder SBA, Crown Castle, American Tower are all interested in India.
Labels: American Tower, cell tower ground lease, cell towers, india, SBA
AT&T Mobility Acquires Dobson Communications
AT&T Mobility announced the acquisition of
Dobson Communications this past Monday for $2.8 billion. We believe this is an excellent deal- and would not be
surprised to see further acquisitions by AT&T or
TMobile as they attempt to buyout their roaming partners and expand their coverage through acquisition not through new site development.
Dobson primarily uses
GSM technology which is what AT&T uses as well.
Dobson's coverage is primarily in rural and suburban smaller markets nationwide. Allegedly, there isn't much overlap in coverage. See
Dobson's Coverage Map here.
Dobson markets under the name of Cellular One.
As
Dobson's towers were
acquired by Global Tower Partners in 2005, we suspect that the
Dobson landowners won't be contacted by
Blackdot Wireless or Md7 to renegotiate their lease agreements downwards because of "duplication". That doesn't mean that landowners with AT&T cell phone tower leases won't be contacted with a new pitch.
Labels: ATT Mobility, cell towers, Dobson
Cell Tower Health - American Cancer Society Summary of Research
At Steel in the Air, Inc., we are constantly bombarded with questions about the issue of the safety of cell towers and the radio frequency emissions from them. Our answer is that we are not qualified to answer the question of whether cell towers are a health risk. We do point out that the
Telecommunications Act of 1996 prohibits local communities from evaluating health risks as part of a decision on whether to approve or deny a cell tower in a zoning hearing. In fact, if it becomes apparent that a cell tower was denied on the basis of health risks, the decision can be overturned on appeal.
From a personal standpoint, while we don't believe that the issue is fully researched, we also believe that most cell towers or cell sites are too far away from the end user to constitute a health risk. Back in my days representing carriers in zoning hearings for towers- we would simply hand out the FCC's pamphlet on radiofrequency exposure as evidence that there was no harm from cell towers or cell sites. Many opponents to towers would find research on the web that seemed to suggest that cell phones were dangerous to human health and try to extrapolate the results to cell towers.
Labels: cell towers, health risks, radiofrequency emissions, Rooftop cell sites
