In February of 2025, Verizon came to the Town of Rochester with a modest proposal. They wanted to place a cellphone tower on 439 Granite Road in Accord. Since then, it’s been a knockdown, drag-out fight in the Rochester planning board.

As of September 14, the tower has been approved. We consider this good news.

This fight is a common one in the era of 5G, the current generation of cellular network that’s been rolled out since about 2019. Conspiracy theories abound saying that 5G causes cancer, that it can be used as a weapon by the government, that it emits radiation that kills birds. Your editor remembers spending 2020 on content to debunk the belief that 5G towers caused COVID-19. As we watched COVID move between the few cities with 5G to all the ones that without it, the theory, like the virus, mutated, and suddenly we were hearing that 5G would actually be used to control the microchips in the bodies of the vaccinated.

5G, despite what its opponents and boosters have spent a decade saying, is pretty much just more phone service. For the most part, it’s taking over the frequences of unused UHF channels, meaning that it carries about the same cancer risk as watching Sesame Street on public access TV in the 1970s. It’s faster than 4G, but works on higher bandwidth so it can be blocked more easily by stuff like buildings, or, say a huge ridge of Shawangunk conglomerate. That means it needs more cell relays to function well.

We were supposed to have a seamlessly interconnected 5G network by now, giving everybody blazing-speed and making us all live in a kind of Star Trek utopia. That was the promise in about 2019. Instead, a massive global resistance movement took hold and blocked installation after installation. This is a story that doesn’t really have any heroes and one in which, surprise, the corporations lied! They promised a world of constant connectivity with blazing-fast speeds. Didn’t happen, and then that 2010s vision of an “internet of things” crashed right into the walls of a looming surveillance state. If stuff like 5G was supposed to give everyone a smart toaster, then forget it. We’re better off without it.

But the other side of the coin is that better cellphone service in rural areas is a real and measurable good. In 2012, an elderly couple died in Andes after a car accident. They tried to call emergency services over and over and, when they couldn’t go through, the husband left the car and was crushed, and the wife went out for help and died of exposure. Our network has expanded hugely since 2012, but we can talk dead zones endlessly. Between Wurtsboro and Ellenville, in Hurley, or at the homes of half the Journal staff.

The galling thing about the Rochester cell tower debate is the lack of honest engagement from many members of the anti-5G crowd. The planning board was upfront about what they could and could not control. They ran a balloon test, checking sightlines on the tower and, when that wasn’t good enough, they started over. They reduced the height by 20 feet.

They considered the effects on the environment, down to the use of native species in the landscaping and limiting ground disturbance for nesting birds. They received the green light from the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and ensured the project was out of the wetlands.

What they could not consider was the effect of ‘cell phone radiation’ on the environment. This, they explained time and again, is federal law. The Telecommunications Act specifically forbids planning boards from going down that road. Still, it kept going, the same fights back and forth with no forward momentum. “It's not merely the threat of being sued,” Planning Board Attorney Dave Gordon said. “I think that we have the threat of being sued clearly from either side” — one side for following the law, the other for not violating it.

This stuff shouldn’t take this long. We should not be so frozen. It should not be such a painstaking job servicing dead zones.

When the board followed its own rules, and federal rules, the opponents went to the town board with a series of new concerns, including the possibility that the tower might fall on their houses. Others in the town reiterated that they’d feel safer with more bars.

Finally, after over a year, the planning board passed this project, as they were obligated to do. They were immediately met with the threat of a lawsuit.