PROPOSED TOWERSNew cell phone towers proposed in the Chattanooga region include:• A 150-foot-tall tower on Finley Stadium land near Main Street• A 120-foot-tall tower on town-owned land in Lookout Mountain, Tenn.• A 150-foot-tall Verizon tower on Mack Smith Road near Interstate 75 in East Ridge• A 180-foot-tall Verizon tower on rural, wooded property on Watoosa Ridge, also known as Napier Ridge, at the border of Catoosa and Walker counties• And a 199-foot-tall tower in Rocky Face, Ga., near The Farm golf course and gated communityHOW IT WORKS• Cell phone providers can build their own towers or rent space on a tower owned by a cell phone tower company.• The more cell phone providers that rent space on a tower, the more profitable that tower becomes.• When mobile phones first came on the scene, the tower networks’ goal was to provide coverage so calls wouldn’t be dropped along highways and major roads.• Today, more towers are being built near residential areas.
A cell phone tower in Chattanooga.Americans are head over heels in love with smart phones, a mere seven years after Apple introduced its iPhone to the masses.
Two-thirds of U.S. consumers now own a smart phone. Their growing demand for data-gobbling uses such as video means users are on track to pass the $100 billion mark this year on data-plan spending, experts say, and U.S. demand for mobile data is expected to grow eight-fold by 2018.
This “mobile data boom” helps explain why new cell phone towers are proposed around the Chattanooga region, from the top of Lookout Mountain to Finley Stadium, home field for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team.
As with any boom, there’s money to be had. U.S. lease holders may get as much as $8.5 billion annually, based on figures from statisticbrain.com. The website says the nation has 190,000 cell phone towers with an average yearly lease rate of $45,000. But one expert says most lease holders don’t get nearly enough rent, based on industry figures that show a single tower can have a gross profit margin of close to 80 percent.