Town to lease space for
Verizon 5-G transmitters

(4/13) In a unanimous decision, the town council voted to lease space to Verizon on the Town’s water tower to install 5-G transmitters to enhance coverage in the Woodsboro area – which currently, according to the Verizon representative, has dead zones. The new service will not only help alleviate frustrated Verizon users asking ‘can you hear me now?’, but increase download speeds by up to 10 times over current speeds.

Verizon initially offered to pay the town $2,000/month for a five-year lease, with five, five-year extensions, for a total maximum lease of 30 years. In addition, Verizon offered a 2% yearly increase on the monthly rate.

While the council was open to the offer, they noted that both AT&T and T-Mobile, which currently lease space on the water tower for their customers, increase their monthly rate by 3% per year, and requested Verizon to match them, which they did.

Verizon said that given the central location of the tower, installing their transmitters on it was far preferable coverage-wise, not to mention economically, to leasing land on an adjacent farm and building their own cell tower.

As part of the deal, Verizon will have 24-hour access to the water tower to allow it to make emergency repairs when necessary. To allow all three-cell phone/internet providers, as well as the town maintenance staff 24-hour access, the chain locking the access gate is ‘locked’ by each provider connecting their lock with the adjoining lock, in what is called a ‘daisy chain’ arrangement. By doing so, each organization will be able to open the gate by simply opening their own lock.

If someone installs their lock in such a way that that it blocks anyone else from accessing the tower, "we will simply cut it off," town staff said. "The offending party will then be locked out until they come to the town office where we can remind them that others need to have access, and show them again how to properly install their lock."

While no timeline for the installation of the Verizon 5-G transmitters was given, it is expected that following the required engineering reviews, the work will begin relatively quickly and completed in a short time period.

5G is over twice as fast as 4G on average and can deliver speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps. 5G phone and hotspot users experience less network congestion and lower latency rates.

5G will enable gigabyte downloads in seconds. Once installed, users of the service in Woodsboro will be able to download a 1-hour, 48-minute town meeting movie in just 49 seconds – that is of course, when the meetings are held in the new fancy town hall when it’s built. In the meantime, they use the speed to download movies in minutes.

At the March meeting, the Verizon representative methodically walked the Council through the folklore surrounding some of the claims found on the Internet about 5-G health effects: "The bottom line is the transmitters are 80 feet or more in the air, the electro magnetic radiation given off by them measured at ground level would be undetectable, masked by natural background radiation."