Telecommunications officials consider pairing wind and cell towers

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(Host) The Vermont Telecommunications Authority needs a lot more towers if it’s going to meet its mandate of extending cell phone coverage to every corner of the state.

And now there may be an affordable way to do that. Officials are looking into putting cell phone transmitters on wind turbines.

VPR’s Ross Sneyd reports.

(Sneyd) The Telecommunications Authority has formed a partnership with Earth Turbines, a Williston company that builds and installs residential wind turbines.

The Authority has been given the goal of establishing universal cell phone coverage in the state by 2010.

Officials say it’s too expensive to build traditional cell towers in rural areas. So it’s working with Earth Turbines to add cell antennas onto much smaller residential wind turbines.

Bill Shuttleworth of the Telecommunications Authority says a pilot project will be built next week in Grafton.

(Shuttleworth) “One of the major goals of the trial is to let potential mobile service providers that would be willing, interested, in building out unserved Vermont kick the tires so to speak and let everyone have a chance to see what this would look like. What does this configuration look like. What does an Earth Turbine look like with cellular antennaes on it. How does that blend into the Vermont environment.

(Host) Shuttleworth says about 200 windmill towers would be needed to reach all of the areas of the state where there’s not currently a cell phone signal.

The authority estimates that 55 percent of the residences and businesses in the state have a mobile signal.

Reaching the remaining 45 percent is difficult because they’re in less populated areas. Shuttleworth says marrying electric generation with cell phone signals may be the perfect solution.

(Shuttleworth) “So it is a true partnership in terms of how we do the actual siting. And that’s unique. Because traditionally cell towers go up and people only consider RF propagation as the sole criteria. We have more of a challenge but we have more of an opportunity because we can use these low-impact towers.”

(Sneyd) If the experiment in Grafton is successful, construction of the combined cell phone and windmill towers would begin this summer.

For VPR News, I’m Ross Sneyd.

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