Consumer friendly would be making telecoms pay for it, not taxpayers.

It is not very consumer friendly to allow every tin pot municipality to price gouge and stonewall infrastructure development. The local control you are arguing for is the same that has caused the underdevelopment and monopolization of the current internet infrastructure (to say nothing of housing and mass transit). So please explain how it is in my interest, as a consumer, to let my town - present and future - extort or strangle* service providers?

*These are not hypotheticals, see Mill Valley, CA where cell phone towers cause cancer and 5g is persona non grata.

These are the same companies the govt gave our airwaves away to for free remember. And we still have the worst Internet of the developed nations.

> So please explain how it is in my interest, as a consumer, to let my town - present and future - extort or strangle* service providers?

Because land selling for its fair value is good for human society. That land is for all of the public. Why should corporations get a deal that doesn't apply to all people?

who's talking about land? This is about antennas on preexisting poles, which exist for the purpose of literally supporting infrastructure. Furthermore any asshole (such as myself) can register an LLC and thus be one of those 'evil corporations' you speak of. So this regulation you seem so dead against would actually be protecting your right to place a 5G antenna.

Since you mentioned 'fair value' for land -- why is it you are arguing FOR rent seeking? That's extortion, not fair valuation.

Telecoms do pay for it. They pay for hardware, install, and rent for the pole space. This ruling just limits how much local govt can charge for pole rent. It is consumer friendly because it helps accelerate a stable roll out and keeps costs down. It also limits the ability of NIMBY cities to block rollouts by over charging.

Ignoring the local economics is the same as getting a huge discount which is the same as the taxpayers paying the difference.

> keeps costs down

For the telecoms. They're only regulating how much municipalities can charge telecoms, not how much the telecoms can charge consumers. But I'm sure the benefits will trickle down.

> The last thing we want for 5G rollout is for it to be hampered by NIMBY cities. Clearing barriers for 5G equipment to be rolled out is a good thing.

I have to concur. NIMBY groups (or cities that are effectively run by and for NIMBYs) makes building cell sites more difficult -> cell network operators need to spend more money building cell sites -> cell service is a bit more expensive and shittier for everyone (and it's far more difficult for newcomers to challenge incumbents). In US we have stupidly expensive (compared to many other countries) cell service with annoying data caps, and enabling NIMBYs to obstruct/make more expensive/block construction of new 5G (or LTE) cell sites will not help that.

If cities make it super difficult for cell operators to install cell sites, it's ordinary people with cell phones who suffer -- through increased service costs, worse service, and shorter battery life (the longer the distance between the phone and the cell site, the more power the phone needs to use).

I'm not some kind of telco industry shill; that industry does lots of things that I find sincerely loathsome -- between selling location data to the most hinky of "data brokers" and trying to do blatantly anti-competitive mergers -- but it's difficult for me to see how letting cities make it more difficult/expensive to install cell towers will help customers out.

Maybe, maybe not. If the regulation set the fixed cost too low, cities are subsidizing telcos (that don't need it).

NIMBY-ism and red tape is a problem, and it has real costs (paperwork and waiting for approval, getting rejected, fixing up the paperwork, licking butt, lobbying, resubmitting, waiting again are all expensive), but simply pushing this on cities is not going to help.

"5G"