Features

Opinion: time to take action on phone masts

In a real sense, it doesn't matter whether GSM masts cause cancer or not. What matters is that we stop putting up masts which cause house prices to fall. Cynical? Well, maybe - but it's as realistic as we can get.

And it may be, that by making masts smaller and less conspicuous, we actually make them physically safer, too. What we need, I think, are smaller area phone cells, using lower power transmitters, and which don't look like huge, threatening eye-sores.

The problem that can't be denied, is a financial one. There may be others; but there is, today, no evidence to implicate mobile phones in cancer. Of course, if one day it turns out that there is evidence, then things will have to change, and fast; but right now that isn't actually the most important factor. What is more important is what people think about it, rather than the reality. People may be hopelessly alarmist, and there may be no danger; but so what?

Last week, seven families in Swindon won a legal battle. They got the local Government Ombusdman on their side in their dispute over a T-Mobile mast - not because they're going to die of some horrible disease, but because they've suffered material, measurable loss. A bureaucratic bungle meant a phone mast got planning permission. These people saw the value of their houses cut as a direct result.

The same week, another case was reported coming up in Felixstowe: exactly the same situation as in Swindon. Here, too, the local authority was late with its objection to a phone mast. Because it was late, its objection was disqualified. The mast was built, even though the local authority had not intended to allow it.

In the case of Felixtowe, the Evening Star reports that the mast is a 3G Hutchison mast - utterly different technology from the Swindon one, of course, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that it costs local people money. It reduces the value of their homes.

And according to the Evening News, "similar council blunders happened in Norwich — in School Lane, Sprowston in 2000 and in Dereham Road, near the Earl of Leicester pub a year later."

Broadland District Council and Norwich City Council, the paper reported, "both cocked up by failing to notify mobile phone firms that they were objecting against them within a certain time limit, so the masts went up by default."

It may be that the money is an imaginary loss - in the sense that the masts cause no physical damage to the human bodies in range. But that doesn't make the price of the house go back up. The value of a house is simply "what someone will pay for it" and they will pay for it no more than they foresee it will be worth when the come to sell it.

Today, if you buy a house near a mobile phone mast, you can be sure its value is affected.

The solution is actually quite simple: don't erect big masts where people live. It's a solution which is being followed quite successfully; masts are being disguised.

That in itself is enough to enrage the protesters who genuinely believe the masts are dangerous and Mast Sanity is in the middle of a campaign opposing the erection of a mobile phone mmo2 mast in Worcester Park, Kingston.

As protest groups go, Mast Sanity isn't a trivial force. On the other hand, its action base isn't a national one, in the sense that every individual protest is, politically, trivial. For example, in Brighton, a massive horde - 12 people - have complained about antennae on top of one block; and at least part of their objection is not health, but aesthetics: "We're concerned about the health implications but that doesn't seem to carry much weight when you are objecting. But this is a conservation area and it shouldn't be put up here," said one objector.

More to the point, for everybody who doesn't want a mast in their own back yard, there are hundreds of people complaining viciously about poor mobile coverage.

In some parts of the world - with regimes that we might regard as oppressive - it is actually illegal to screen an area off from mobile phone signals. The mobile network is seen as a resource, like clean water or electricity, and it's an offence to obstruct it - and so you can actually place a call from the sixth story underground of a basement car park.

How on earth can anybody resolve this issue? Even if community authorities decide to ignore the health issue (and most people probably do, if they use a phone themselves) we can't ignore the immense leverage of the property value lobby.

A clue was provided by the launch, last year, of IP.Access - a company which puts micro-cells into remote rural communities where a Vodafone or Orange mast couldn't be cost justified.

A new product, NanoGSM was launched earlier this year at the 3GSM Congress in Cannes. The technology is marketed as a low-cost solution. What the manufacturers may be missing, is an opportunity to promote it as a low-radiation solution. It certainly could be promoted to the mobile phone providers as a low-profile solution, unlikely to generate either media interest, or hostility.

Of course, tall masts are needed to cover motorways and railways lines. The range of a GSM mast can't go much over 20 miles (for perfectly simple "laws of physics" reasons) but it does take a fair amount of power to punch a signal that far. If, however, the thing only has to reach a couple of hundred yards, it becomes a far less threatening concept.

And if it isn't any bigger than a car aerial, it won't need planning permission, and it won't excite alarm.

In the real world, of course, the background signal from GSM phones is utterly lost in the really powerful radio beams from radar, microwave links, and even hand-held phones. But radar doesn't diminish the value of your property, and you can make a personal decision about whether you want to hold a GSM phone to your ear, or not.

The prospect is ironic. One of the easiest ways to provide a mobile phone cell is to put one of the NanoGSM devices into a WiFi hotspot. And yet, the proliferation of WiFi hotspots is seen as a major potential threat to the spread of the mobile phone networks.

It will be interesting to see how the conflicting influences structure the communications network of the future. However, in the meanwhile, we do have to stop putting really ugly constructions in neighbourhoods where they look utterly wrong, and destroy the happiness and prosperity of the people who live there.

And if we can do that while at the same time reducing the amount of RF generated close to the centre of the cell, why not?