Begin forwarded message:
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 16, 2005 5:55:26 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Ip ip <ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] Menino maps cellphone gaps
By Andrea Estes, Globe Staff | July 15, 2005
It is an aggravation of the age, the conversation-stopper that seems
always to include the phrase, ''You're breaking up." Cellphone dead
zones have irritated many, but recently they have really annoyed
Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who says his cellphone conversations get cut
off day after day as he traverses the city's neighborhoods.
The low-tech, urban mechanic mayor is fed up, he says, and there's no
acceptable explanation why a city like Boston should have so many
pockets of fog.
I heard Mr. Menino interviewed on NPR yesterday. Fascinatingly, he is
very upset with the mobile carriers for dead spots, but he is against
leasing city poletops to them, and against having them put up towers
in places where he considers them to be aesthetically unpleasing. He
wants them to solve the problem "some other way".
One therefore wonders how he expects the carriers to fix the problem,
since he doesn't want to let them build more base stations. Perhaps
with magic. Politicians often seem to believe that engineers have
magical mechanisms that we're just too stubborn or pigheaded to
use....
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
--Richard P. Feynman, in his Rogers Commision Report
Perry
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