But all that radiation has some activists and officials concerned about the potential health implications of the antennas. "Apparently the city is willing to gamble with the health of its residents for $25 million," said Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. He is introducing legislation to require the companies to pay for radiation inspectors as part of their franchise agreements. "There is no study that has looked at the cumulative effect of these transmitters," he said.
That's got to be one of the dumbest things I've seen a politician say in... oh, sadly, hours. I wish it was unusual to see a politician spouting junk science and requesting rules to impede the construction of new infrastructure, but unfortunately it happens practically every time I look at the news.
For those not in the know, an 802.11 device puts out no more than a couple hundred milliwatts, and once you take the inverse square law into account, the capacity of such a device to transfer energy to anything nearby is pretty limited.
The city is also filled with millions of such low power emitters. If such devices were a problem, really we'd have much more serious problems than a few new pole top devices. Even banning the hundreds of thousands of existing 802.11 devices people have set up in their homes wouldn't be enough. Cell phones, cell phone towers, walkie-talkies, microwave ovens, microwave communications dishes, television and radio transmitters, etc. are everywhere, in the millions. We'd need to shut all of them down, too. That is ignoring all the televisions, radios, CD players, computers, etc., all of which emit a tiny amount of electromagnetic energy. If we got rid of all of these things, maybe then the marginal change caused by adding some pole-top 802.11 transmitters would be observable, even if it was still completely unimportant to health.
Luckily federal law keeps municipalities from preventing the construction of new cellphone base stations, but nothing protects companies from the likes of Mr. Vallone. Lets hope people laugh at him loud enough that he drops the whole thing, and soon.