EDITOR: While the Sycamore Fire story dominated the front page
of the Oct. 7 edition of the Morgan Hill Times, the account of a
19-year old woman who fell from a cliff near Anderson Reservoir
brought up an issue that many who don’t live up in the hills face,
namely the lack of or very poor quality mobile phone service.
EDITOR:
While the Sycamore Fire story dominated the front page of the Oct. 7 edition of the Morgan Hill Times, the account of a 19-year old woman who fell from a cliff near Anderson Reservoir brought up an issue that many who don’t live up in the hills face, namely the lack of or very poor quality mobile phone service.
I moved to Holiday Lake Estates in April 2002 and this issue is probably the only one that causes me concern because of how dependent we have become on mobile phone service, particularly in instances like “Sarah” faced when she was trying to reach help.
The irony is that when I first learned of the fire from a colleague at work who lives in San Martin, my first instinct was to call my wife on her mobile phone figuring she was outside in the yard, but then I remembered that she wouldn’t even get the voice mail, let alone hear the ring because of the poor service.
My point in writing is to hopefully bring some light to this issue for both the city and the county to work with service providers to allow them to erect towers to provide for broad, reliable coverage up in the hills. While I fully understand how raging debates over cell towers heat up (e.g., Gilroy), many small towns, such as Los Gatos, have solved this issue by agreeing to strategically locate towers and even disguise them (e.g., as trees or hide them in church steeples) so as not to take away from the natural surroundings that attracted us to move here in the first place.
Working together, I am sure that the city and the service providers can eliminate the all too familiar and frustrating refrain of “Can you hear me now?”
Brian Fukumoto,
Morgan Hill
