Surfing the 5G/Small Cell Tsunami: Managing the Millions of New Cell Towers and MAKING MILLIONS from Them!

Over the next 7 years, the telecommunications companies will be needing nearly 1 Million cell towers to meet the 5G demand. In addition to new small cell towers, they will need fiber optic and antenna upgrades on all of the 320,000 existing ones. To put that number in perspective, a typical city will soon have nearly TWICE the number of cell towers as they have streetlights–more than one tower per city block. Worse yet, each new tower will require at least 2 street cuts, causing an unprecedented impact of millions of street cuts, and associated traffic congestion, potholes, and massive disruption to our national infrastructure. The news isn’t all bad though. In response, many cities are adopting innovative strategies to not only manage this “tsunami”, but actually partnering with the telecommunications companies, municipalizing, and re-purposing their street lights, and charging as much as $3,000 for each of the hundreds of new towers, creating millions in new sources of revenue. Other cities have been even more visionary. They are “flipping” their annual streetlight systems from “must pays” (liabilities) to “cash cows”, or revenue streams. Learn how your public works agency can manage the oncoming tsunami of 5G/Small Cell deployments in your community and negotiate win-win outcomes that benefit carriers while addressing key community concerns, such as aesthetics and public safety.

Proficiency Level

Applied

Learning Objectives

1. Examine case studies from communities like theirs and what they have done to combat the wave of millions of small cell towers, street cuts, radio frequency (RF) radiation problems, increased load for permits, plan reviews, street cuts, and inspections.
2. Explore what they can do to get ahead of the Small Cell wave by collaborating with telecommunication providers while revising your permitting programs and practices.
3. Transform and “gigafy” your city, creating ultra-fast municipal broadband networks by re-purposing traffic signals and street lighting during the massively disruptive small cell installations.