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A. Wireless Industry: 77 Cell Towers Failed in the First Hours of The Oct 2017 Fires in Northern California

From 10/16/17: Piedmont, CA City Council Meeting || 9/30/17: No Significant Gap in Verizon Coverage:

In the first video, above, at a 10/16/17 Piedmont, CA City Council meeting, a Crown Castle/Verizon representative tells the truth on the record.. The Wireless alerts failed to get through. Residents with copper, legacy landline phones received the reverse-911 warnings to evacuate.

Continue reading “Cell Coverage Failed in October 2017 California Fires”

From the League of California Cities:

While over 300 cities opposed SB 649 (Hueso), the telecom bill, the Governor’s decision was uncertain until midnight on Sunday, Oct. 15. City officials were relieved to discover the Governor vetoed the measure stating: “I believe that the interest which localities have in managing rights of way requires a more balanced solution than the one achieved in this bill.” The League thanks the Governor for recognizing the value of local authority in this important policy area. We also thank the many legislators who abstained or voted against the bill.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

California: Gov. Jerry Brown Vetoes Bill Easing Permits on Cell Phone Towers

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/16/california-gov-jerry-brown-vetoes-bill-easing-permits-on-cell-phone-towers/

By TRACY SEIPEL | tseipel@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: October 16, 2017 at 12:25 am | UPDATED: October 16, 2017 at 10:50 am

Continue reading “SB.649 Vetoed by Gov. Brown”

What I Saw Yesterday at the Community Meeting at Santa Rosa High from 2:30 to 5:30 pm:

This is great information from start to finish. If you could not attend, please view the videos at the following links (unedited video).

• Facebook Video Part One (29:34)
• Facebook Video Part Two (1:59:22)

Thank you Governor Brown for joining U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris at a Community meeting in Santa Rosa, hosted by CA Senator Mike McGuire and Assemblymember Jim Wood and partners including the City of Santa Rosa Fire Department, Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, CAL FIRE, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and the City of Santa Rosa. You spoke to the community with sincerity and conviction in recognizing the tragic loss of loved ones and property in the largest fire in California history, in providing the real assistance needed to continue the fight against the devastating fires still burning across the State and asking each of us to call your office (not your cell phone) if things are not proceeding in the recovery, as planned.

Here are some other observations from yesterday’s meeting:

1. We Don’t Need to Make America Great Again . . . AMERICA IS ALREADY GREAT; it’s been that way for a long time. The evidence was the tremendous 10/14/17 Community Meeting in Santa Rosa attended by victims of the tragic California fires that started on 10/8/17 (and are still burning) and our elected leaders and emergency responders who responded to this disaster with precision, action and wisdom.
2. The victims of this fire showed up yesterday in every sense of the phrase. They supported each other, asked relevant, thoughtful questions, and shared good information about available rentals and ways to get assistance. There was no whining or complaining — just Americans focused on solving problems, continuing to fight the fires, mourning the loss of loved ones, homes and treasured items and focused on rebuilding. All of us from We the People of the United States were the stars of yesterday’s meeting.
3. Yesterday, We the People expressed our gratitude to the thousands of men, women, military, civilians (and even inmates) from many different states who have responded to set up camps and fight this fire across many fronts, line by line. I met a crew from Oregon checking in to the Motel 6 in West Sacramento at 2:00 am early Friday morning for three hours of sleep before getting deployed in the morning. Our hats go off to each and every one of you who are out there fighting the flames and smoke for all of us.
4. Our elected officials, hit all the right points in conducting a smart and sensitive meeting that provided very relevant information, gave everyone a chance to ask questions (mine was just about the last question at 5:15 pm) and provided great perspective from responses to previous disasters. Senator McGuire and Assemblymember Wood stayed to the very end. Thank you, gentlemen.

Before the meeting started, I was in the second row. As Governor Jerry Brown entered, he asked for my name, shook my hand and spoke to me briefly before taking his seat in the front row. We discussed how communications during the first few critical hours of a disaster need to be robust and not fragile. We discussed that Wireline not Wireless communications technology performed better in this fire disaster and that One Big Dig for California i.e. undergrounding Fiber-Optic, Coaxial and Copper lines in the rebuild would make this public utility asset more defensible from attack from future disasters or terrorism. Finally, I mentioned that a bill on his desk right now, SB.649 — Wireless Tools of Commerce, would present a new, potent fire hazard to every community in California — the 35 cubic foot ancillary equipment boxes next to each utility-pole-mounted cell phone antenna would contain back up power systems (lithium-ion batteries, like the ones in Tesla cars that catch fire, or propane/diesel generators) that would become bombs on the sidewalks in a fire. I asked him to veto this unnecessary Bill, SB.649, because it would be a fire hazard and take away local communities’ abilities to plan and execute the best future for their residents.

My Questions Transcribed from From 10/14/17 Community Meeting Video — Questions That Still Needs Answers

My name is Paul and I am from Petaluma, Our city loves Santa Rosa and wants to help you in anyway that we can . . . I have a question for all of us, for Senator Harris and for Governor Brown.

1. The first question is, if you need reliable notification for emergency and disasters, why can’t we all retain our landlines that are copper and they are the ones that work in a power outage, because the Wireless Nixle alerts and all of the other Wireless means of communication instantly go down as soon as the fire arrives. Your landlines will continue to work because the [remote power] on these copper lines still operates [during a disaster].
2. I have a question for Kamala Harris: will you help us to report AT&T for price gouging on those landline services that prevents people from keeping this very import emergency service. As a carrier of last resort, AT&T must provide these landlines to everyone who wants one [and do so at an affordable price]. It’s the 175% price increase over eight years that pushes people away.
   [APPLAUSE](Note: actually, as you can read here the price of the basic AT&T California state utility phone service went up 138% from 2008-2016 and ancillary services went up 60%-525%).
3. And finally for Governor Brown, you have legislation on your desk right now that is a fire hazard. If SB.649 [Wireless Tools of Commerce] gets signed by Governor Brown, it would place at residents’ doorsteps — right next to every utility pole in every residential neighborhood — a refrigerator-sized 35-cubic foot ancillary equipment cabinet which will contain lithium ion batteries as backup [power for the proposed cell phone antenna to be installed on these utility poles] or possibly propane or diesel generators. These will explode in any fire.

What I am suggesting is that, as we rebuild, we put all of this infrastructure underground to make it safe for everybody in residential neighborhoods [for any future fire or earthquake and we do not install the unnecessary, fragile and not-dependable-in-a-disaster, so-called “Small Cell” cell towers in front of homes in residential neighborhoods. We would be better served by undergrounded Wireline fiber-optic internet to every home — the fastest, highest-bandwidth, most reliable, most secure and most energy-efficient way to close the Digital Divide.]
[APPLAUSE]

Substantial Evidence That Demands a Veto of SB.649

1. This is What We Are Working Hard to Prevent . . . Brain Tumors and More

No one will ever forget that John McCain, just a few days after undergoing surgery to remove as much of his brain tumor as possible (a deadly Glioblastoma), on Fri 7/21/17, shortly before 2 a.m., McCain voted against against a “skinny” plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act.

Several days later, McCain delivered an impassioned speech to encourage bi-Partisan health legislation, going forward. You can read his full remarks from 7/25/17, below.

McCain’s prognosis for his Glioblastoma is not good. McCain told 60 Minutes: “They said that it’s very serious. That the prognosis is very, very serious. Some say three percent, some say 14 percent. You know, it’s a very poor prognosis.”

California needs to listen to and learn from John McCain. You might be surprised that John McCain was the only Republican Senator (and only one of five Senators) who voted against the Federal 1996 Telecommunications Act.

Glioblastoma Facts

• The median survival rate (a measure of how long patients on the treatment tend to survive) is 14.6 months
• The percentage of people alive five years after receiving the diagnosis, is just 10%
• Glioblastoma also killed Senator Ted Kennedy, Vice President Joe Biden’s son, 46-year old Beau Biden, and the CA Senate’s own beloved Ira Ruskin, who lasted only three years after his diagnosis

Continue reading “Gov. Brown: Be Smart. Veto SB.649.”

October 12, 2017

The Honorable Governor Jerry Brown
State Capitol, Suite 1173
Sacramento, California 95814
tel 916-445-2841
fax 916-558-3160

Dear Governor Brown:

Veto SB.649 — Fire Hazard

As firestorms rage across California, I implore you to veto a bill that is currently on your desk: SB.649. This bill carries the promise of a hidden and unprecedented fire hazard. In this moment, it is preventable.

This bill has met with increasing opposition as more cities, counties, and residents have come to understand what SB.649 truly represents. As you know, more than 300 cities and 47 of 58 counties have told you they do not want to relinquish the last vestiges of local control over Telecom in exchange for a capped compensation formula.

Many residents are aware of the hazards of 4G LTE/AWS and 5G millimeter waves boosted through previously impenetrable barriers by phased array software. Our own military science and well as Soviet science shows harm: eyes, skin and testes are subject to damage from these high-frequency microwaves.

Continue reading “Open Letter to Gov Jerry Brown”

Governor Brown, please help California by vetoing CA State Bill 649.

This post refutes the words written by SB.649 sponsor Sen. Ben Heuso in an 10/5/17 OpEd Piece in the Sacramento Bee, entitled Jerry Brown can help bring a wireless revolution. Below, we have annotated Sen. Hueso’s words with responses from Scentists for Wired Technology (‘S4WT’).

Hueso: Gov. Jerry Brown can bring the Wireless revolution to California by signing Senate Bill 649.

S4WT: Sorry, Sen. Heueso. The wireless revolution has already occurred over the last 25 years and coverage is already complete for 98% of the US population — including California. As we learned in 3/2/17 Federal testimony at the US Senate, “97.9% of Americans can choose from three newtwork operators [Wireless carriers] and 93.4% can choose from four [Wireless carriers] plus more than a dozen virtual [Wireless carriers].”

There is no need for Gov. Jerry Brown to sign SB.649 and many good reasons for Gov. Brown to veto SB.649 — which is an unjustified power grab by and an unnecessary subsidy for Telecom firms, including AT&T, Verizon/Frontier — firms enjoying the benefits of their ‘Public Utility’ status as Carriers of Last Resort (COLR), without completing the copper to fiber-optic upgrades that were promised and already financed by decades of fees on landline telephone bills. Instead, these firms are looting their regulated Wireline entities to enrich their unregulated Wireless entities and hurting the public good. This is corporate power run amok, and the FCC, State of CA and the CPUC are all enabling and abetting these actions.

Instead of gifts to these Telecom firms, the Governor can protect Californians by vetoing SB.649, and then directing his friend, Michael Picker — the friend that Brown appointed to the position of President of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in 2014 &mdash to order financial audits and investigations of these Telecomm firms.

Hueso: Telecommunications access is a necessity in the modern world, so much so that governments around the world pay to subsidize wireless deployment.

S4WT: Telecommunications access (by Wireline) has been a necessity since the invention of the telegraph and the telephone — and still is because, unlike Wireless, only Wireline telephones reliably provide 911 automatic address detection and actually work in extended power outages caused by emergency disasters, like the devastating California fires that spread far and wide to over 190,000 acres since 10/8/17 — instantly crippling the fragile, Wireless cellular telephone network . . . while Wireless copper and fiber-optic cables, buried in the ground continued to operate during the disaster.

How many pizza boxes does it take to equal the volume of one so-called “Small Cell” two-way microwave transmitter installation? (Hint: a lot of them.)

Let’s put to rest a prevalent marketing/branding lie – “Small Cells are the size of a pizza box” — repeated by the CTIA, Wireless Carriers, and legislators. Here is the evidence for this hard-to-believe-it-would-ever-work attempt to “fool all of the people all the time”.

First, here are some actual pizza boxes:

Domino’s Extra Large: 16.25 in. x 16.25 in. x 2.00 in. = 0.30 cubic feet

Domino’s Small: 10.25 in. x 10.25 in. x 1.75 in. = 0.10 cubic feet

Second, this was said in the US Senate on 3/2/17:

Scott Bergmann, VP, CTIA – The Wireless Association in his 3/2/2017 Testimony to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation:

“Right now today there are challenges both with the local zoning process and, as you mentioned, with federal agencies, so we would certainly appreciate this committee’s attention to finding opportunities to right size that process so that we exclude small cells where appropriate that are the size of a pizza box or a lunch box. I don’t think anyone thinks it’s a process that applies to a 200-foot tower should apply, when you are putting a lunch box on top of an existing building.”

And again in the CA Senate on 4/4/17:

CA Senator Ben Hueso reading a CTIA-provided script, written by lawyers and lobbyists from ALEC in his 4/4/17 testimony to the CA Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee:

“Building the wireless network of tomorrow requires the rapid deployment of small cell [structures] often no larger than a pizza box — and that’s a small pizza box [audience laughter] and you can see it here [more audience laughter]. We brought an example of one.

. . . Which was the only demo prop that Vice Chair Morrell allowed into the 4/4/17 CA Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee Hearing on SB.649; the demo prop brought by Opposition (shown below) was not allowed — an obvious act of discrimination.

Continue reading “How Many Pizza Boxes Does It Take?”

Finally, on Sun Oct 15 @ Midnight, CA Governor Brown vetoed SB.649!

Through Sun Oct 15 @ Midnight, Governor Brown signed 607 Bills and vetoed 101 Bills

Continue reading “Gov. Jerry Brown Watch”

The tanks are rolling forward, over all of us . . . and nobody in the Federal, State and Local governments care. It’s business as usual: if we spin the same fables and self-serving narratives over and over, the people will just believe/accept them.

Ajit Pai, acting FCC Chairman, on-camera, at an FCC open meeting news conference —
hiding behind a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup cup.

Of course, Bruce Kushnick, contributing to the Huffington Post, once again, has the best data and analysis to explain what is really going on here: propaganda from an obviously Captured Agency

The FCC released the “Twentieth Annual Report and Analysis of Competitive Market Conditions with Respect to Mobile Wireless”; a propaganda piece on Wireless competition in America to help AT&T and Verizon. As we will discuss, the statistics and presentation are based on a questionable manipulation of the facts, or more importantly, it is the omission of basic information that is the real problem.

• 9/26/17: FCC Rewrote America’s Broadband History; Covers Up $½ Trillion in Overcharging
• 9/26/17: Part II: Facts Missing from the FCC’s Section 706 Broadband Reports
• 10/9/17: Not happy with your wireless service? Blame the FCC divided the discussion into three parts
  1. Part I is a discussion of how the FCC has manipulated the statistics in their recent 20th wireless report to help AT&T and Verizon over the public and your interests.
  2. Part II: America is 59th in LTE speeds and more expensive for data than 39 other countries, not to mention that 40%+ of your data usage is for adtech and software designed to track your online usage, and even your location.
  3. Part III: Wireless is not a substitute for a wired connection to the home or office. You paid for a fiber optic connection. They manipulated the accounting. Time to start the investigations.

Continue reading “2017 FCC Wireless Competition Report”

If you are not familiar with Piedmont, CA, it is a lovely family-oriented community nestled in the Oakland hills. It is is only 1.7 square miles and contains 11,000 residents who moved there for the great schools and the jewel of the community: Piedmont Park, which is adjacent to the Elementary, Middle and High Schools has the city’s great Piedmont Sports Field (Witter Field) used for organized baseball, football, and soccer.

The city of Piedmont is basically an island, surrounded not by water, but by the City of Oakland, a host to many Verizon cell phone towers that adequately serve the area. At present, there are no Verizon cell towers in Piedmont, but that’s not a problem, because Verizon Wireless customers who live in or travel to Piedmont have adequate cellular coverage for making calls and texts whenever and wherever they want — connecting to the Verizon cell towers already installed in adjacent communities.

The following video is substantial evidence that there is no significant gap in Verizon Wireless Coverage for making calls and text in the residential areas of Piedmont, CA where Crown Castle and Verizon wish to install nine full-power cell towers at the height of second story bedroom windows. Therefore, the Piedmont City Council must defend the CA Constitution and protect their residents by denying all nine of these Crown Castle/Verizon Residential Cell Tower applications. We prepared and delivered substantial testimony to the Piedmont City Council on Mon 10/2/17 (video here).

We applied the correction factor for high-speed, pulsed, digital microwaves from CDMA and 4G/LTE, per the GigaHertz Solutions’ product manual and product video.

Continue reading “Piedmont, CA: Verizon Cell Tower Catastrophe in These Idyllic Neighborhoods”