Subject: Cell phone mania in Italy (DeRosa)....
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 120400 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers"
To: emfguru
--------------------------------------------------
......Following has been forwarded by Elena DeRosa .
It seems that there is much more Blue World awareness in Italy than
in the U.S. To what should we credit that higher level of concern, I
wonder......
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)......
rbeavers@llion.org.......
.....It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.....
EMF-L web-site can be found at:
EMF-L archives can be found at:
..................PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PROFITS..................
Cell Phone Mania Hits Italy
.c The Associated Press
By FRANCES D'EMILIO
ROME (AP) - With mamas calling sons, sons calling girlfriends, and most
everyone calling someone to discuss what's for dinner, Italians have
found one more thing to be passionate about: cellular phones.
But Italy's mania for mobiles - the number of cell phones in Italy
surpassed the number of conventional phones this summer - means a sharp
rise in the number of transmitters needed for the high-tech talk to flow.
That's where Italians, from Sicily to the Alps, are drawing the line.
Citizens are taking on the cellular phone industry, fighting the
installation of high-rise transmitters in their communities.
Cell phone networks are anxious.
``We've had enormous difficulty in realizing our plan,'' says Pietro
Porzio Giusto, vice president at TIM, Italy's largest mobile phone
operator.
``There will be ever more problems at peak time'' if citizens continue to
balk, he said. ``They will find the lines busy.''
That doesn't seem to bother Federico Polidoro, whose eight-story building
in Rome is draped with a banner to protest the installation of a
transmitter.
``We've blocked the arrival of cranes four times,'' he said. ``We found
out by accident in December when we saw the workers who were trying to
install the transmitter.''
Polidoro, a 35-year-old statistician who lives on the seventh floor, said
he and fellow tenants collected 1,500 signatures of protest from the
neighborhood, where five towers have already gone up.
Consumer activists say one tactic of the cell phone operators is to scout
for sites where the landlord is a business or a religious institution and
to avoid condominiums, where the occupants are owners with a say.
Those willing to sign on for a transmitter can practically name their
price these days. The result, according to TIM's Porzio Giusto, is that
costs have doubled.
``We've paid exaggerated prices,'' Giusto said.
About 200-300 new towers are needed each month to keep up with the
increased cell phone use, phone company officials say. This summer, the
number of cell phones in Italy, a nation of 57 million people, hit 25
million.
Polidoro concedes that there is a contradiction somewhere in a country
that embraces cell phone chatter but balks at the transmitters.
``But using a cell phone is an individual choice. A transmitter over your
head or next to you without your choice is another thing,'' he said.
Like his colleagues at the other two mobile phone operators, TIM and
Omnitel, Roberto Piermarini of Wind contends local politicians whipped up
anti-transmitter sentiment. He noted the protests really took off last
spring, before several rounds of mayoral and other local elections
throughout Italy.
``We react by explaining that their fear is unjustified,'' said Antonio
Bernardi, Omnitel's legal affairs director.
The phone companies say no conclusive evidence has turned up to link
exposure to electromagnetic waves emitted by the towers to health
problems or illnesses.
``They say nothing is proven, but this goes on 24 hours a day,'' said
Alessandro Maggini, pointing from his dining room window behind Rome's
Trastevere train station to a 25-foot high Omnitel transmitter 15 yards
away.
``It's not like a TV set you can turn off,'' he said.
Under a 1998 law, Italy has far more stringent standards for the
intensity of electromagnetic fields generated by transmitters than other
European Union countries have.
``The perception of risk is strongly distorted,'' said Angelo Lozito, a
physicist for Legambiente, an environmental protection group. ``They
don't know that in the house, the clock radio, the refrigerator,
generates far more (electromagnetic) pollution.''
AP-NY-08-12-99 0109EDT
Copyright 1999 The Associated Press. The information contained in the
AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise
distributed without prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com