• City of Laramie effectively prohibited the building of any new radio towers via zoning regulations adopted in 2000. Partially due to "radiophobes."

 
• Did not explicitly prohibit towers, but requirements combine to make finding a site within the city limits impossible... on purpose!

 
• As a result, LARIAT is being forced to build in unincorporated areas, some of which are far from neighborhoods we need to reach

Lesson #7: To ensure that citizens will be able to benefit from wireless broadband deployment, FCC and Congress must take a greater role in pre-empting prohibition of new towers. Increases in EIRP limits (by approximately 8 dB) would allow greater range and hence construction of fewer towers. (The fact that so many systems are now illegally amplified indicates that EIRP limits are too low.) Allowing high gain directional antennas at customer nodes of point-to-multipoint systems could reduce interference while improving performance and range, allowing more to be done with fewer towers.