Vantage Tower Group, a company that builds cellular towers, wants to erect one on 57th Street just east of Waters Avenue, but nearby residents are skeptical.
The company has asked the Chatham County-Savannah Metropolitan Planning Commission for a permit and says it plans to raze a run-down vacant house at the neighborhood’s entrance.
A 120-foot cell tower built in its place would be enclosed by an opaque fence surrounded by a variety of landscaping features.
Terry Thomas, Vantage Tower’s site development manager, says the tower would be self-supporting and freestanding, with no guy wires as required by the planning commission.
The tower will contain five nodes for the transmission of wireless service, with AT&T occupying the top two nodes and the bottom three available for lease to other coverage providers.
The tower’s antennas would be contained within the tower itself and the structure would be designed to look like a simple flag pole, said Jack Butler, a comprehensive planner with the MPC.
Nearby residents question whether they want a cellphone tower located so close to their community.
“We don’t like the condemned shack,” said Rosa Davis, president of the Edgemere-Sackville Neighborhood Association. “But we don’t think the tower would be an improvement, either.”
To try to ease residents’ concerns, the MPC asked Vantage Tower to show how high the tower would be by suspending a red balloon at that height on July 11 and 12.
Davis and other neighborhood association members attended the test.
She said the neighborhood can work with the city to deal with the shack that’s on the site, but the tower would be a permanent visual burden.
“We are looking for this neighborhood to look better,” she said. “That is one of our goals — to look better and be better, and we don’t think (the tower) would service our mission. At some point, we want this to be the grand entrance to our neighborhood.”
AT&T spokesman Bob Corney said the tower is needed at that location to supplement current bandwidth capacity.
Cellphone data usage has increased more than 30,000 percent over the last few years, Corney said, and while someone may have three or four bars of service in an area, the ability of the network to handle the usage is limited.
“There is a stubborn thing called physics,” Corney said “And there is a certain capacity in the network.”
Corney points to the iPhone and its App Store, only 5 years old, and the amount of information that is streamed using such mobile software.
“We want the folks to understand that that tower serves that neighborhood,” Corney said.
Butler said the proposed tower location is the most efficient site in the area.
He said the MPC is working to forge solutions for digital capacity and demand issues.
“Our goal is to provide an infrastructure for this growing demand that won’t require new towers every time,” he said.