During my travels this past summer, I visited a Druze village outside of Haifa that has dismantled its cell phone towers. The village is located at the top of a mountain and it had been a popular place to host towers from all of the national mobile services providers.
The ban was an extreme response to a rash of health problems in the community and it is unclear whether the community is any healthier now without mobile antennae or indeed, are there increased health risks associated with losing access to the usually outstanding mobile signal strength in the rest of the country. That kind of epidemiological study is beyond the scope of this posting.
Instead, I’ll focus on the balance for consumers’ rights. Do citizens have a right to access information about the towers in their neighbourhoods?
Recently, the UK telecom regulator, Ofcom, did battle with the country’s information commissioner over full public access to a national database of mobile base station locations. Ofcom first refused the request, claiming that the information was already publicly available. After an internal review, it found that not all of the requested data was available, and so it then refused based on an exemption for National Security and Public Safety and an exemption for Intellectual Property Rights.
Ofcom lost its appeal. As a result, the telecom regulator has been ordered to disclose the location, ownership and technical attributes of mobile phone cellular base stations.
Would Industry Canada lead an initiative to provide equivalent access to tower location information in Canada? Do our collective rights to access antenna location information outweigh any perceived confidentiality due to competitive concerns or issues of national security?
In Canada, who would or who should lead the discussion of public access to such information?
Update [October 5, 7:30 pm]
There is an easy to view website that mashes Canadian cell towers onto Google Maps: click here. Thanks to John, who commented on this blog entry.
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Ofcom, mobile antenna