Reality Check: Is Apple's 3G Network Complaint True?

It turns out Steve Jobs wasn't exaggerating all that much when he said it can take three years to get a cell tower approved in San Francisco.

A seemingly exasperated Jobs addressed the problem in a June 16 press conference. "When AT&T wants to add a cell tower in, oh, Texas or somewhere, it takes three weeks to get approval in a typical community. To get a cell phone tower in San Francisco, it takes something like three years," he said at the press event to discuss the iPhone 4's antenna issues two weeks ago.

AT&T has acknowledged shortcomings but only to say that it's spending a lot of money to increase its 3G coverage. AT&T said at the end of last year that it had spent $65 million from 2008 through the third quarter of 2009 on upgrading its 3G network in the San Francisco Bay Area. What AT&T hasn't said is why it's taken so long for iPhone users to see a noticeable change in their coverage quality.

So we decided to find out what the holdup is in CNET's hometown of San Francisco and why exactly some of our editors can't get reliable AT&T service in their living rooms. Other cities can be tricky, but ours can be uniquely difficult. Government red tape, tricky terrain, a heavy concentration of smartphone users, and yes, those NIMBY (not in my backyard) types all conspire to make the City by the Bay one tough place to improve cellular service.

City records for the past few years show that applications to build new wireless telecommunication stations (the city's term for cell sites) can take a few months or up to a two years or longer before a final action, such as approval to build a new panel antenna is handed down by city officials.

And this drawn-out process is well-known in the industry. "San Francisco has one of the most complicated, burdensome, arcane processes in the country, without question," said Patrick Ryan, adjunct professor of telecommunications policy at University of Colorado, Boulder.

Ryan has worked with cities of all sizes on upgrading and building wireless networks, and he says San Francisco stands out because of the many hoops that carriers have to jump through to get even small panel antennas installed, much less giant cell towers.

Panel antennas--which measure about one foot by four feet and about 8 or 9 inches thick--are the only practical option wireless carriers have to bulk up their coverage in the city and county of San Francisco. The city does not allow cell towers to be built because the local government considers them an eye sore. So the best option for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and others is to build panel antennas onto existing structures--the penthouse of a tall building, the steeple of a church, a utility pole--typically in clumps of three to 12.

The neverending upgrade
Carriers have seen a dramatic rise in the amount of data flowing over their cellular networks in the past few years. That's mostly thanks to consumers' eager embrace of smartphones. More than 54 million smartphones were sold in the first three months of 2010 alone, according to research firm Gartner, accounting for an almost 50 percent jump from the same time period a year earlier.

And while people are doing more mobile e-mail checking and app downloading, they're also cutting the cord on landline phones. Landline usage has dropped 19 percent between 2000 and 2008, according to data compiled by the FCC. If people are not talking on landlines, then they are switching to VoIP or cell service.

All of that adds up to be a constant strain on 3G networks. So even though the city of San Francisco already has 709 cell sites, carriers have to continuously add more antennas to deal with the load.

The network is "never done," said James Peterson, deputy vice president of public affairs for AT&T in California. "We're continuously growing, adding, enhancing. That has to do with customers' usage--traffic on our data network has increased by a factor of five."

"In the Bay Area we have a heavy concentration of smartphone users, which is terrific," he said. "But that's not without its challenges. People used to talk on their phone and maybe check a stock or sports score. Now they're streaming video, full-length feature films."