New Roswell Expert: Proposed T-Mobile Tower Is ‘Overkill’ for Fixing Service Gap

T-Mobile’s new 108-foot cell tower proposed for Roswell, Georgia, likely won’t remedy the significant gap T-Mobile has in LTE service in the area, and so there’s “no technical justification” for the tower, said the preliminary engineering report Tuesday (docket 1:10-cv-01464) in U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia of Ben Levitan, the city’s new expert witness (see 2404230002). The court approved Levitan as the city’s substitute expert witness March 25 after its previous expert resigned unexpectedly March 2, citing stress from the assignment (see 2403110001). Levitan found that T-Mobile’s 4G/LTE service in Roswell would improve by only 2% if T-Mobile’s tower application is approved, leaving more than 52% of the area with no 4G/LTE service at all, said his report: “It is my opinion that this tower is unnecessary to solve the claimed problems T-Mobile is trying to fix." T-Mobile’s concerns about a lack of cellphone service to the specified 0.9-square-mile-area and the inability of residents in the area to have 911 service “are unfounded,” it said. If, however, T-Mobile's claims “are taken at face value” and the company wants to increase the number of people who can use T-Mobile’s service in the Roswell area, “there are numerous industry standard engineering options which will repair the gap with no additional equipment and spare T-Mobile the cost of a new 110-foot monopole cell tower,” it said. One option is small cells, said the report. The carrier “currently boasts 43,800 such cells providing coverage and capacity improvement to small pockets of weak service throughout the country,” it said. “As such, this discussion could lead to the city and T-Mobile agreeing on a solution that would likely be more favorable to T-Mobile in achieving their goals," and also satisfy the concerns of Roswell residents, it said. The proposed 110-foot facility is clearly "overkill" for fixing the claimed service gap, and it’s “cost-prohibitive to solve the problems claimed,” it said. T-Mobile’s responsive expert witness report is due June 19.