Residents wonder: Why is Fort Collins cell service so bad? Here's what can be done about it
Tim Carstensen learned the hard way to avoid orders in south Fort Collins when he was making a living as a driver for GrubHub, Uber and Lyft.
If he didn't, the same thing would happen about once a week: He’d be waiting at a restaurant for an order, or en route to pick up an Uber or Lyft rider, and his cell service would cut out. The disconnect triggered the system to turn over the order to the next driver, wasting Carstensen’s time and fuel.
“It was a huge pain point for me,” Carstensen said. “When the point of going out to make money is to pay bills, feed your family and put more gas in your car to deliver more, it feels like money being pulled straight from your bank account.”
To put it in the politest way possible, Fort Collins does not have good cellphone service. There are problem areas spread throughout the entirety of city limits, particularly in southeast Fort Collins, south-central Fort Collins, northeast Fort Collins and all the city’s major throughways. Not everyone has service issues, and you might be fortunate enough to avoid any major impacts if you live near a cell tower operated by your provider or have reliable access to Wi-Fi calling at your home and workplace.
But the implications of inconsistent service are clear for people like Carstensen, who used to depend on gig work for his livelihood. They’re also no secret for anyone who’s dealt with outgoing texts trapped in cellphone limbo, navigation that gives up on you in the depths of a labyrinthian neighborhood, phone calls where the other person sounds like they’re talking to you from inside a paper bag, or — the worst-case scenario — a dropped 911 call.
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The Coloradoan heard from dozens of community members for this story. Susan Selby, a Parkwood East resident who has Xfinity service, doesn't know if she'll ever get rid of her landline. She bought a new iPhone, made dozens of trips to the Comcast store and surveyed her neighbors before finally concluding that her east Fort Collins neighborhood is a sort of Bermuda Triangle for cellphone reception. (Xfinity uses Verizon infrastructure.) She had a 911 call drop last spring.
Jamal Page can get AT&T reception if he stands in a handful of specific spots in his Old Town workspace. He takes regular laps outside to make sure he didn’t miss any texts or calls while he was sitting at his desk, and if a call is really important, he takes it at home.
Bill and Terry Zalewski, who live across the street from Fossil Ridge High School, watched their already-spotty cell service vanish after T-Mobile removed a tower near their home last spring. They finally caved and bought a cellphone booster for their home last year. They depend on it to make calls and text their grandkids while they wait for T-Mobile to install a temporary tower about a mile from their house.
A theme for people who grew up here: The service has gotten worse as the city has grown. A theme for people who moved to Fort Collins from somewhere else: They’ve never had service this bad.
“It's a running joke,” said Jed Link, a resident of south Fort Collins’ Registry Ridge neighborhood who’s gone through three different carriers in search of consistent coverage. “People will say, ‘I don’t have service.’ And the response is, ‘Oh you must be in Fort Collins.’ It’s embarrassing.”
There’s not one factor driving Fort Collins’ cell service shortcomings — there’s more like nine or ten. Though increasing population and slow-moving wireless providers have contributed to coverage and capacity gaps, much of the problem comes down to Fort Collins’ dearth of tall buildings and restrictive land use regulations meant to preserve the community’s look and feel.
Fort Collins’ high standards for cell sites have kept the community mostly free of behemoth, ugly towers that sully mountain vistas. About two-thirds of the city’s towers and base stations are disguised to look like water towers, flag poles, grain silos, clock or bell towers, church steeples or pine trees. (Though in the case of the latter, known as a “monopine,” beauty is in the eye of the tower-beholder.)
The city’s siting and aesthetic standards have also given it some control over a domain that is largely overseen and regulated by the Federal Communications Commission.
For better or worse, the city’s standards have come at the cost of coverage.
“There's an obvious tension between what our standards allow and what we need to have coverage for our residents throughout the city,” city planner Will Lindsey said. “Sometimes you’ll hear commentary like, ‘Well, so what if you can't get a good signal at the corner of Taft and Drake or something? Is that really that big of a deal?’ And, unfortunately, I think as time goes on and technology continues to proliferate, it is going to be a big deal for almost everybody.”
Why is Fort Collins cell service so bad?
The city commissioned a special report, known as the Wireless Telecommunications Master Plan, in 2019 to nail down the root causes of the problem and what the city can do to fix it. CityScape, a local government consulting firm that specializes in wireless communication, took a full inventory of cell sites, created maps of infrastructure, sought public engagement and did a deep-dive of the city's land use regulations. Among the plan’s findings:
No provider has tackled the issue, despite a growing number of cell sites.
Every carrier in Fort Collins has coverage gaps in their network, or dead zones where the signal from the closest tower can’t reach people. Over half of the city has insufficient network capacity, where the towers in place aren’t meeting the demand of the population in that area.
There were about 120 wireless facilities in and just outside Fort Collins as of May 2021. They consist of both free-standing towers and roof- or wall-mounted base stations: both large “macro cells” that make up the backbone of the network and a smattering of small cell sites that boost network capacity in denser areas where pressure on the network decreases the quality of coverage.
But half of those towers and base stations offer coverage for only a single provider, so propagation maps that depict the spread of facilities and their coverage throughout the community don’t tell the whole story. If you live near a single-provider AT&T tower but get your service from Verizon, that tower does nothing for you. Though the Land Use Code encourages providers to co-locate whenever possible, there's not much incentive for providers to do it. Even if there were, the code often doesn’t allow structures to be tall enough to support antennas for more than one provider.
Height is a big obstacle for carriers.
A macro cell needs 360-degree “line of sight” with other macro cells to effectively transmit a signal. That means it needs to be tall so trees, buildings and topography don’t interfere with the signal. But Fort Collins’ Land Use Code, even where it does allow freestanding towers, requires the towers’ height to fit the context of the surrounding area. If there aren’t any tall buildings in the area, it’s going to be a hard sell to install a 50-foot tower.
If you’ve spent any time in Fort Collins, you’ve probably noticed there aren’t many tall buildings outside Old Town and the Colorado State University campus. The Land Use Code doesn’t allow buildings higher than 28 or 35 feet (depending on the zoning) in a wide swath of the city’s footprint. Macro cells are usually at least 40 or 50 feet tall.
Height is one reason providers often put their equipment on building roofs. The Land Use Code allows roof-mounted wireless equipment to be 15 feet taller than the building, so a building at or near the maximum permitted height can get providers the height they desire if the building owner is interested in a lease. The city has a dwindling supply of eligible roofs, though, and the combination of equipment weight and logistics means building owners are often uninterested in leasing space to more than one provider for equipment.
Service suffers in neighborhoods.
Coverage and capacity issues are especially common in neighborhoods because zoning regulations make it difficult to build freestanding cell towers there. Most neighborhoods fall under zoning types that require providers to go through an “addition of permitted use” process to build a tower. It’s a relatively time-intensive process compared with the more streamlined review for roof- or wall-mounted equipment, and again, providers have to keep towers on the shorter side to align with the context of the neighborhood.
So providers look to roofs for a leg-up. But few buildings in neighborhoods meet both city and provider standards for roof- or wall-mounted equipment. Providers need tall buildings, which aren’t common in neighborhoods, and they can’t put equipment on a residential building unless it has at least five units.
The height and zoning issues combine to create an obstacle for companies looking for a tower site. A representative of Atlas Towers described some of the difficulties in development review documents submitted to the city in 2018. Atlas was working with Verizon to build a new tower off Horsetooth Road between College Avenue and Shields Street, where Verizon coverage was inadequate. The company found 19 potential lease options in the survey area, but 12 of them were in zoning categories that didn’t allow towers.
None of the other seven properties was big enough for a cell tower or owned by someone interested in leasing, so Atlas looked again at the lots with the wrong zoning. Only one of those properties, Southside Baptist Church, had a big enough lot and was willing to lease space. Because the site wasn’t zoned for a tower, Atlas had to go through the city’s more extensive addition of permitted use process.
After years spent searching for a lease and working through the development review process, City Council approved the tower in July 2018. But then the church closed and the project stalled out. The tower still hasn’t been built. If Atlas took up the project again, they’d have to start all over.
The city should expect a lot more proposals for cell sites.
Fort Collins can expect dozens of applications for new macro cells and hundreds for small cell sites in the next 10 years, the report predicted. Most of those new macro cells will be for areas that need initial coverage. Areas that already have infrastructure may need three or four new macro cells to fill each network’s coverage gaps, assuming the sites aren’t co-located.
The report said the city should also expect requests for height increases for existing sites, which would give them the height needed to accommodate antenna arrays from other carriers.
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Providers aren't always quick on the uptake.
This wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the city report, but it’s worth noting that Fort Collins can’t make a wireless carrier build a cell site. The main providers in the city (Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile) need to kick off the process of building a new site and see it to fruition. The city can create incentives for co-location or building infrastructure in poorly covered areas, Lindsey said, but that doesn’t mean a provider will necessarily prioritize its Fort Collins projects over developments in other places.
In the case of the T-Mobile tower near the Zalewskis in southeast Fort Collins, for example, the provider waited years to submit an application for a new tower site after receiving notice that Platte River Power Authority would no longer allow co-locations on its equipment. As of Feb. 1, they hadn’t activated a temporary tower nearby despite getting city sign-off to do so in late December.
All of this is just a sampling of the factors contributing to inconsistent cell service in Fort Collins. The widespread nature of the causes may help explain why it’s such a tricky problem to solve. The foundation is decades of regulatory decisions — and a pattern of infrastructure buildout that’s favored the city’s more densely populated areas over its sparser regions, without really keeping up with either one.
If you want to dig even deeper on Fort Collins cell service, check out the Wireless Telecommunications Master Plan posted on the city website at https://ourcity.fcgov.com/wirelessmasterplan. Page 39 includes a map of all macro cells and small cells in the community as of May. Page 40 includes a map of AT&T sites. Page 41 includes a map of Verizon sites. Starting on page 67, there's a list of all facilities with provider information.
What is Fort Collins doing to improve cell service?
So what can the city do about this?
The plan recommended a half-dozen strategies for improving coverage, and city staff presented several of those and a few ideas of their own to council at a January work session. These are some of the strategies recommended in the report and at the council work session:
Consider additional incentives for roof- and wall-mounted equipment. Incentives could include expedited review or relaxed zoning regulations.
Create a more streamlined conditional use process for reviewing cell site proposals in residential zone districts.
Consider promoting the use of city-owned property, like parks and golf courses, for concealed cell towers that could blend in with lighting structures, utility poles and the like. This strategy could make it easier for providers to find locations and address some of the neighborhood service issues, because many neighborhoods have a city park nearby.
Develop design standards and expectations for cell sites. This could include both a detailed design guidelines document and a Land Use Code update with more specific aesthetic requirements. The current code requires the towers to be concealed but is vague, Lindsey said, which can lead to protracted negotiations.
Encourage the use of public art as a way to conceal towers and equipment.
Create an online map of wireless infrastructure in the community so people can see where the gaps are and who operates towers in their area. The wireless plan includes an inventory of all macro cells and small cells in and near city limits as of May, complete with provider information.
Overall, the idea is to shorten the process for reviewing cell sites and find more appropriate sites for them while clarifying what the city expects them to look like. Under the status quo, review of a cell site takes anywhere from six months (the quickest Lindsey has seen) to multiple years. Streamlined review and clearer aesthetic standards could reduce the back-and-forth between the city and providers and allow the city to get more sites approved faster, Lindsey said.
Many of these changes may come in an in-progress revamp of the Land Use Code. The city hired a legal consultant to work on changes to existing standards for cell sites. Public engagement will take place this spring, then staff will draft the recommended changes to bring to council and the Planning and Zoning Commission by September. Design guidelines could take longer than that, but staff wanted to focus on the code first because it has legal weight.
Lindsey said community members could expect to see improved coverage within 2½ to 5 years after the Land Use Code update, “depending on how ready applicants are to come in and start filling the gaps.”
Neither the plan nor staff have formally recommended this, but both note that the city has another option. Council could allow taller towers, which would enable more co-locations and give sites broader reach. Done effectively, the strategy could mean taller towers, but fewer ones.
Council had mixed feedback to the strategies. Those who spoke at the work session liked the public art idea, and council member Kelly Ohlson said design standards are long overdue. Council members were interested in a more streamlined review process for neighborhood sites as long as it preserves aesthetics.
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The city properties strategy, which Lindsey called one of the most significant to come out of the wireless planning process, met some hesitation from council. Mayor Jeni Arndt said council should be cautious about anything that could effectively use city assets to subsidize private interests. Council and staff discussed the spectrum of that strategy, which could range from simply not objecting to sites on strategically located city properties to actively encouraging their use for cell sites.
Arndt and council member Shirley Peel, whose district covers southwest Fort Collins, have been the most vocal proponents of improving cell service. They both pushed for faster implementation of the wireless strategies at the January work session.
“The initial map was a little bit disconcerting,” Arndt said. “There's some safety implications here, so I'm just thinking about expediency of timelines.”
Peel added in an interview that she’s encouraged by the plan but wishes council had started working on this 10 years ago. She said she’d support relaxed zoning standards for towers and more incentives for co-location, though it’s not yet clear what that could look like.
“With the new concealed designs that they're coming out with, I think we can add towers and we can add height without compromising our aesthetics,” Peel said. “It just takes a little bit more effort.”
Link, the Registry Ridge resident with poor service in his neighborhood, thinks the city’s centralized approach and high bar for aesthetics is preventing the community from getting the infrastructure it needs. He said the city needs to find a balance between “not looking like a spaceship” and having consistent cellphone service.
“We have to accept that part of people living here means that we're going to have to have some infrastructure,” he said. “We don't live in the Wild West. We live in the city of Fort Collins. There's got to be a trade-off here, and I think we've we swung too far toward the preference for no development. Population is growing; we have just refused to create the infrastructure to support it.”
In Lindsey’s view, something’s got to give. If city leaders don’t want to loosen aesthetic standards — and council members indicated at the work session that they don’t — then the city needs to pull a different lever. That could mean allowing more height or allowing structures in more zoning districts with a more truncated review process. Otherwise, he said, service probably isn’t going to get better.
“The whole reason we did the plan was to understand the existing dynamics that have led us to the situation we're in, and now we have an understanding,” he said. “We need to kind of pivot and figure out where to go from here. Because, obviously, it seems like what we've been doing historically isn't working anymore.”
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What providers have to say about Fort Collins cellphone service
Andrew Cole, who works in community and municipal engagement for Verizon, commented at a fall council meeting to say Verizon supported the plan. He said the company was particularly interested in allowing cell sites in more zoning districts and putting more of them on city property, especially in areas where a city park or golf course could increase service quality in neighborhoods.
“… there are some unique aspects of existing policy that make deployment of wireless infrastructure a challenge, and though Verizon is currently working on a number of projects to enhance the network in Fort Collins, we would like to do more,” Cole said. “Given this, we think the time is right to modernize the city’s regulations that control the placement, size and other related impacts that result from wireless development.”
The Coloradoan sent detailed questions to Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile for this story, asking about known problem areas in the community, explanation of factors limiting coverage in the area, plans to improve coverage and capacity in Fort Collins and recommended governmental strategies to help improve service. Verizon and AT&T sent statements that addressed some of the questions. T-Mobile didn’t send answers or a statement by the Coloradoan’s deadline.
Verizon Communications Manager Heidi Flato said the company values the “collaborative, solution-oriented leadership” of Arndt, the rest of council and city administration. She added Assistant City Manager Tyler Marr has been “instrumental in finessing internal processes” in alignment with the city and Verizon’s shared goals.
“We continue to work with the city to understand community feedback and improve upon policies that facilitate and expedite densification of our network while also caring for how infrastructure blends into the existing cityscape,” Flato said. “We continuously invest in the Fort Collins community with both traditional wireless telecommunications facilities and small cell projects, a number of which are planned for 2022. We hear the community’s collective desire for improved service, and we are taking the right steps to get there.”
Flato added that Verizon generally supports “local rules that enable carriers to predictably, efficiently and economically deploy.”
An AT&T spokesperson said the company remains “committed to working with the city and permitting authorities to find solutions that balance the needs of our business with the concerns of the community.”
With or without Land Use Code changes, more wireless infrastructure is coming. The city issued building permits for 38 small cell sites since last May, bringing the total to about 70 either approved or under review. Most of them are in a 3-square-mile area that covers Old Town, CSU and the neighborhoods close to them.
Small sites are shorter, smaller and much easier to get approved, but they can’t create stellar coverage on their own. Their reach is much more limited than that of macro sites — think a few hundred feet compared to a few miles. Providers commonly put them in the right-of-way, as stand-alone poles or attached to street lights or traffic signals, to fill in capacity gaps in the city’s densest reaches. FCC and state regulations give the city a limited time to review applications for small cell sites and allow companies to place them in the public right-of-way.
Companies are also likely to start adding 5G capabilities to their existing sites in the coming years. Lindsey said. He predicts that many of the sites in the community can support 5G with mechanical upgrades.
Community members interviewed for this story were largely supportive of the city regulatory changes.
“I don't care how they do it,” said Selby, the Parkwood East resident, during an interview on her landline. “I just want cell service.”
A note on health concerns about radiation from cell towers
FCC regulations bar local governments from rejecting cell site applications based on concerns about the health effects of radiofrequency (RF) radiation, and the federal agency maintains that ground-level exposure to radiation from towers is hundreds to thousands of times lower than FCC safety limits.
As more cell sites are built, one route the city could take is hiring an independent expert to measure ground-level exposure near macro cells and small cells to make sure exposure is below the federal guidelines.
The Coloradoan studied peer-reviewed research about health effects of RF exposure. We found that research on this topic is still evolving, but there isn’t strong evidence at this point that human exposure to RF radiation at regulated levels is associated with adverse health impacts.
meta-analysis that looked at 17 studies on the topic
review looked at studies assessing “non-specific physical symptoms”
are working on a series of studies to fill in some of the gaps about RF exposure and health effects
Jacy Marmaduke covers government accountability for the Coloradoan. Follow her on Twitter @jacymarmaduke.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Why is Fort Collins cell service so bad? City looks at ways to fix it
