Even though the FCC could have simply overridden a White House decision to reject the backup power requirement, it's deciding to reel in its ego and revise things for the betterment of all involved. After taking a fair amount of flack for its emergency plan being too outlandish and impossible to afford / implement, the agency has stated that it will issue a new proposal "with the goal of adopting revised backup power rules that will ensure that reliable communications are available to public safety during, and in the aftermath of, natural disasters and other catastrophic events." Details beyond that are scant, but we suspect the whole "at least eight hours of backup power" could be changed to something smaller. Moral of the story? Don't ditch that Y2K preparedness kit just yet.

[Via mocoNews]

The White House's Office of Management and Budget has rejected the FCC's plan to require carriers to juice most cell towers with at least eight hours of backup power, citing a failure to solicit public comments. In this case, "public comments" would particularly refer to the CTIA and its members, which had sued to stop the FCC in its tracks; besides the staggering cost of outfitting a majority of towers with backup power systems, carriers have argued that they already have sufficient disaster recovery plans in place for making sure service interruptions are held to a bare minimum following a loss of juice. The FCC says it's "considering [its] options" following the ruling; technically they can overrule the OMB on the matter, but they'll just be staring down the barrel of the CTIA's suit if they do.

That sale of virtually all of Sprint's tower infrastructure announced back in July has now been finalized, giving buyer TowerCo a whole boatload of CDMA, iDEN, and WiMAX footprint it didn't have just a few hours ago. Sprint looks at the $670 million sale as a way to buy itself some "additional liquidity" and "focus more closely on our core business of providing communications services to our customers" (but let's be honest, it's really just about the additional liquidity); TowerCo, meanwhile, sounds like it's anticipating that it'll be able to lease out space on the towers to other carriers as they expand down the road. For its part, Sprint wasted no time signing up for a long-term lease on the very towers it just sold, but here's our doozy of a question: dare we say they're now a TowerCo MVNO?

[Thanks, moochy989]

Cell towers have obviously always been a danger to aircraft and the occasional light changer or BASE jumper, but the FCC's been facing scrutiny from environmental groups for years over the risks towers pose to another group of fliers: birds. A February court battle brought against the feds by the American Bird Conservancy -- dealing specifically with the threat of so-called "tower kill" on migratory birds in the Gulf region -- saw a ruling demanding that the FCC finally get down to business and come up with a game plan for dealing with the threat that cell sites pose to birds, particularly at night. Naturally, there's still some hemming and hawing, legal wrangling, and wringing of hands going on amongst tower owners and their allies, largely over concerns that the ruling's going to lead to denied and delayed applications for new tower construction. Apparently no one's bothered to teach those little guys what the red lights mean?

[Via textually.org]

Color us flabbergasted, but tower climbing is being deemed "the most dangerous job in America" by Edwin Foulke Jr., head of the Occupational, Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). A recent look at the industry found that five climbers perished during a 12-day span this spring, bringing the grand total to seven in 2008. Of course, there are already remarks that the recent rush to expand 3G networks could be somehow connected, with Craig Lekutis, president of WirelessEstimator and a former tower industry manager, stating that the "recent spate of accidents must be viewed as an industry-wide cause for concern, both on the carrier and climber levels." In order to help bring awareness to the intrinsic hazards, OSHA is pushing a "Tie or Die!" campaign -- which, honestly, sounds a bit brash on the surface -- but we're all for reminding folks to anchor down that somehow have the ability to forget.

[Image courtesy of Verizon Wireless]

On one fateful day in December of 2005, Japan's NTT DoCoMo erected a tower -- the most sinister of towers, in fact -- in a Kawanishi bus station. Ever since, the dastardly cell station has been emitting blast after blast of electromagnetic radiation, allegedly causing a host of health problems for the area's residents: sleeplessness, headaches, high blood pressure, even cataracts and diabetes -- you name it. Happily, a coalition of concerned citizens filed a complaint against the carrier earlier this year, which has finally agreed to remove the evil structure and return the immediate vicinity to its pre-cellphone days (although it made a point of not admitting that the tower caused any health issues in the process). Personally, a lack of signal is likely to cause us high blood pressure just as much as tower radiation is, but perhaps that's just us.

[Via textually.org]

As the number of wireless customers grows, carriers must add cell towers to fill in gaps in coverage and dead spots. More often that not, there's a heated debate between local residents and the wireless carrier regarding where to place the cell sites and how to make them as visually unobtrusive as possible. In the small town of Philomont, Virginia, residents have turned down Sprint's offer to build and disguise a local cell site as a 106-foot barn silo. The cell tower was described as "visually obscene" by one of the local residents, suggesting the company instead share a 100-foot flagpole already used by Verizon. Naturally, Sprint's not so keen on the idea, pouting and screaming that it doesn't like to share (actually, they had some excuse about not having access to the best spots on the flagpole because they're already in use) -- but any way you slice it, take note that rural Virginians value their silo-free skyline over extra bars of reception.

Proving once again that wireless technology isn't all bad, researchers from the University of Tel Aviv have determined that cellphone towers are as good as, if not better than, traditional meteorological techniques at measuring rainfall patterns. The team took data already documented by the carriers about each tower's signal strength over time and compared it to information that had been collected by radar and rain gauges, and found that not only did the towers accurately detect the electromagnetic disturbances inherent to storms, but that the degree of change in signal strength was directly proportional to actual rainfall. While widespread utilization of this data could probably have an immediate effect on forecasting if combined with current methodology, the researchers have an even more ambitious goal of detecting signal variations from the end-user -- that is, on consumers' handsets -- for aggregation into even more precise and localized reports once weather-related changes can be teased out from among the many other signal strength variants.

[Via Slashdot]