Can you expand your footprint by one antenna for the Boy Scouts?

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@BoyScoutE wrote:

AT&T,

     I work for a boy scout camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's called Raven Knob Scout Reservation. We are located approximately 8 miles west of the merger of I-77 and I-74 in Surry County, NC. We have over 10,000 scouts and scouters come to camp every year to learn important life skills and to have fun at the same time. This is a mission you support with your generous sponsorship of the Boy Scouts of America as the national wireless sponsor. 

    We have one problem. Eight miles is just barely too far for your current coverage of the interstate to provide meaningful service to our camp. There is another tower closeby, on Fisher's Peak, that you could use to establish coverage by simply putting an antenna on top of the already existing tower that serves Carolina West, Verizon, and Sprint customers.

    This expansion would serve many people and provide a fantastic level of security for our well traveled, but very large camp as well as service to the thousands of paying AT&T customers we have that come to camp every year, from as far away as Florida and Pennsylvania. We have had multiple scouts and scouters get lost while hiking on our reservation with perfectly good AT&T phones, but they did not have coverage to allow camp to contact them or vice versa only 8 miles from the interstate. This simple problem could be avoided if AT&T would step up to the plate and provide service like the other major carriers do in our region.

 

Any update on a possible expansion of coverage in this area would be excellent. I have spoken with Customer Service and Managers multiple times, so if you aren't willing to expand your coverage here at this time, a simple no will be sufficient, I will simply continue to advise Scoutmasters to use Verizon, Sprint, or Carolina West. 

 

I am not interested in a femto-cell, as it will not provide coverage to the scoutmasters who are lost in our back-country, the major reason for requesting you to expand your home-network.

 

If there is anything I can do to help you expand your coverage here, please let me know. The local phone company is installing fiber-optic internet service to our location at this time. This is supplementing our 300+ extention in-camp phone system that also provides 12 DSL lines. With Verizon, Sprint, and other companies offering cellular service in our area, and the camp's extensive investment in it's own communications technology, AT&T is the last major telecommunications gap for our otherwise throughly connected reservation. 

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In order to expand coverage, AT&T would need to install a new tower.  Installing a new tower requires many permits, land to build the tower on, power to the tower, and access to the tower by their technicians (24x7).  Quite often, local zoning prohibits the building of a new tower, so just to get the permits, they often need to get local politicians to approve the zoning changes.  Everyone will complan about the poor coverage, but no one wants to allow the tower to be built in their neighborhood for fear it will lower their property values, so it is nearly impossible to get the permits required.  In most cases, it takes years from when the process starts until they get all the permits, and approvals, then they still have to build the tower, install the supporting infrastructure, etc.  I would say that you would be looking at a minimum of 5 years from the beginning to end, if it is "fast-tracked", and that still doesn't account for the financial side of how much it will cost vs how much additional revenue it will provide.  Rememebr AT&T is a business and they need to justify to their shareholders whey they spent millions of dollars to build a new tower that doesn't increase their revenues any.  That is often harder to do that to get the governmental permissions...

I guess what I don't understand is why they don't use the existing (as in it's already built and has been there for over a decade) tower that serves the area I'm requesting AT&T to expand coverage in. Everybody speaks about how a tower would be hard to approve in a local area and that makes sense, but that's not necessary here because a tower is already built. This tower serves the other carrier's phones in the area I would like AT&T to serve. Why doesn't AT&T lease space on that tower and put up an antenna (literally an antenna because the tower is there) to provide coverage if Verizon, Sprint, and Carolina West can do it from this one tower? The datalines are there, the power is there, the access is there, it is seemingly only AT&T that isn't. AT&T even serves the rural area of Surry County, just not this rural area of it that's right next to the Blue Ridge parkway and I-77. It doesn't make sense that they'd leave a gap here when other cell companies offer service where I'd like AT&T to from the same tower I'd like AT&T to offer service from. 

That's the ticket then. Show them it's worth their time and money. Have you seen any successful ways that people have done that in the past? I don't need to re-invent the wheel, I just need to convince them that this is a well traveled and diversly populated area. The census data does not accurately reflect the number of people that travel to this area, as there are many people that travel through this area for our camp or to get to the Blue Ridge Parkway, or along I-77. 

It's not as easy as just hanging an antenna on an existing tower. There are weight and wind shear considerations. The antenna is actually pretty light compared to the weight of the cable from the ground to the antenna. It could be thousands of pounds depending on the length. The tower could already be maxed out.