The planning board of Hancock turned down a company’s petition to erect a cell tower on private land last week. The location would have damaged the property values of several nearby homeowners, which was incidental, in my view, to having to live with the structure next door – a lattice-style steel tower, supported by a large concrete base, and associated housing for utility equipment. If approved, it would have required a new road up the side of the hill, which ought to have had the state in arms because it can barely keep up with Route 123 washing downhill along that stretch after a hard rain.
There was the scent of extra broadband coverage in the air. But last I heard, the petitioning company had no tenants on the tower in the form of mobile carriers, nor did it have any on the tower they sold to Antrim planners several years ago. The towers seem to be going up for other industrial, push-to-talk, walkie-talkie uses. For utility crews and such.
But not consumer broadband.
In meeting rooms around the world, they have moved on to data-site discussions about the vast amounts of energy and water required to support artificial intelligence (AI). New York has placed a moratorium on new, hyperscale data center installations. Governor Kelly Ayotte is on record opposing data centers in New Hampshire. My brother was a Starlink subscriber for a few years until fiber reached his house. Starlink worked fine, but Fidium (fiber) is currently cheaper. Fiber comes to the pole in our field, but we’re happy with Xfinity’s cable.
The truth is, there is plenty of broadband around. Everyone I know has a mobile telephone. Instagram links pile up in my messaging app. About the only thing we watch on television at home is Netflix or Prime movies. Podcast recommendations are now like the old zucchini joke: In summer, why do Mainers (or New Hampshirites, or anyone) roll up their car windows at a stoplight? For fear someone will toss in another podcast recommendation.
Like many people our age, my wife and I are beginning to play the version of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey wherein, essentially blindfolded, you try to guess where your children will be living when you decide it’s time to move closer and be a burden to them. We want someplace walkable – for a quart of milk, a burger, and a beer, a church in which to pray I won’t be separated from her after, you know, the whole truth comes out. Broadband is not part of our consideration set.
As a former Hancock business owner and still a Monadnock region booster, my view is that we don’t have a broadband problem; we have broadband inconvenience. For Hancock specifically, the inconvenience is basically between Route 9 and Route 202. When we owned it, guests at the Inn at Hancock (then the Hancock Inn) would occasionally get frustrated when they were out of range of our Wi-Fi until someone from the office tracked them down by landline. At which point, the virtues of being outdoors in this region – mobile phone dead to the world – revealed themselves. Really. They did. Why are you here, otherwise, I’d ask our guests? (Really, I did.)
Why is anyone here, otherwise?
Which is beside the point because I feel confident saying there are currently no meetings underway at any provider about fixing the broadband inconvenience suffered by Hancock residents (or Antrim, etc.). I have no expectation of receiving a text message from Verizon telling me I can, at last, call home from the Hancock Market, three miles away, in case I forget what I was sent to purchase. (It happens all the time. It’s why God made lists, my wife will tell me. Do you have your list, she will ask, before I go out the door.)
Verizon has my business. Other companies have other people’s business. Together, they have rolled up the market of customers in the village who are of age and means to have a mobile phone – without the need to pay any extra tower rent, as I suspect they would if it were that important to them. Or us. There are bigger connectivity problems out there, involving populations cut off from the world, in Appalachia, Alaska, the Everglades, perhaps. We aren’t one of them.
What with AI data center discussions going on, satellites transponding from space, you would have to wonder about the future of cell towers, anyway – a thought that occurred to me the other day walking Huckleberry along a rail trail. By golly, I nearly tripped over one of those wasting wooden ties.
Jarvis Coffin writes fiction and essays on rural life. He is a retired media and advertising sales executive and former chef/owner, with his wife, of New Hampshire’s oldest inn, the Hancock Inn. Reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and keep up with all his musings at jarviscoffin.com.