Orange Beach, Ala. – (OBA) – New utility poles for wireless devices are popping up in Orange Beach in an effort to combat “dead zones” of service in the city. The council on Aug. 2 approved the installation of 12 of the poles by the end of the year and some are placed already.

“The city is in support of improving our coverage,” Community Development Director Kit Alexander said. “We have some coverage issues. We are in support of instead of these large cell towers but having these smaller antennae in the right of way that will greatly improve our coverage.”

While the city can’t prevent the poles from being used in the city per FCC regulations, the city can provide the parameters of how they look and their height.

“They are restricted to 50 feet in height and they have to be decorative poles,” Alexander said. “Generally, we’ll see black poles in the neighborhoods and then green poles within the state’s rights-of-way to match the streetlights. They also have some distance criteria. They have to be placed a certain distance apart so we don’t end up with clusters of these utility poles.”

Having them at 50 feet in the residential areas will make the poles more effective, Alexander said.

“Houses are limited to 40 feet in height and we gave them an additional 10 feet in order to allow those poles to not be obstructed by buildings,” she said. “The buildings can cause obstruction of the connectivity between these utility poles. The additional 10 feet is to help with coverage which the city does support. We’ve got some dead areas and people are struggling with that.”

The first 12 poles are being placed by Verizon but other carriers are expected to place more in the city in the coming months.

“Verizon’s pretty good here but we have T-Mobile that needs to improve their coverage,” Alexander said. “We’ve got a lot of visitors that come down here that use T-Mobile and AT&T and we don’t want them to come down here and then find that they don’t have reasonable coverage. This is an effort to support the improvement of coverage but at the same time have design standards that complement our rights of way.”

Alexander said she is aware of at least three of the poles already in place, one on Barbados Drive in the Terry Cove subdivision, on Bonito Avenue near the city’s medical arts building and near Cactus Cantina on Canal Road.