Towers, Telegraph and AT&T

I guess I don’t get out much. The late winter landscape is especially naked this year due to lack of snow. You can see through the forests, normally covered with green or snow, huge towers placed by various wireless providers. Not that many really, since there is no wireless phone connections where I live. I think I live in the 2% area not covered by AT&T or Verizon. There is a tall tower on the mountain top behind our house that is for emergency communications. It is 300 feet high with flashing lights to warn aircraft. It is in my sight, but no phone for me, but great emergency response.

What about these towers? Why don’t people want them in their back yard or nearby mountain, although everyone seems to want the service? I think I know the answer. AT&T, a venerable old corporation in America, was originally formed from American Telegraph and Bell Telephone, and became American Telegraph and Telephone.

Telegraph is old style communication. It used the Morse code as its alphabet to signal across America, originally from hill top to hill top with flags to designate each letter or a single word. Sight distance was important, just as it is today in modern wireless communication. Then, an improvement came about which allowed communication over wires using a series of dots and dashes. The first communication in this way was in the 1840s, announcing the nomination of Henry Clay as the presidential candidate for the Whig party. This went from near Baltimore to Washington, D.C. Soon, there were telegraph lines all over the place, strung like spaghetti along railroad tracks and highways, with thousands of poles supporting the wires. The telegraph gave way quickly to the telephone. The legacy of the telegraph industry, AT&T, can be seen along the tracks in many American cities. Those thousands of poles still stand in utter disrepair as a testimony to this by gone age. Not a pretty sight; actually pretty ugly.

So what will be AT&T’s legacy in our wireless age? The towers that there are not enough of to do the job will probably multiply across the mountain tops and hills until we get beyond 100% coverage, soon to give way to a new technology not requiring towers. And how many will we continue to see in the bleak winter landscape?

(I pick on AT&T here because they actually have Telegraph as part of their name, but Verizon, Motorola, and others present the same problem, and no one will want to provide service in my area after this.)