T-Mobile, City of Roswell Spar Over Coverage Gaps in Run-up to Evidentiary Hearing

T-Mobile and Roswell, Georgia, exchanged dueling briefs Wednesday in U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia in Atlanta in advance of the court’s March 4-6 evidentiary hearing into the 14-year-long cell tower fight between the carrier and the municipality.

It “remains a fact” that T-Mobile “seeks only to enhance its existing network, not ensure the provision of services,” said the city’s brief (docket 1:10-cv-01464). T-Mobile countered in its own brief that the evidence to be introduced at the hearing will show that the city's denial of T-Mobile's cell tower application "continues to violate" Section 332 of the Telecommunications Act.

T-Mobile contended in its February 2010 tower application that the proposed site is based on customer needs and is intended to provide seamless, ubiquitous and reliable wireless coverage, said the city’s brief. Yet 14 years later, T-Mobile still hasn’t provided evidence “of a single customer complaint nor any consumer data regarding a lack of coverage in the purported gap,” it said.

No evidence exists in the record demonstrating that T-Mobile has lost any customers or that it can’t compete in the subject area “due to a lack of service,” said the city’s brief. T-Mobile’s “apparent position in this case remains the same,” it said. To demonstrate a gap in coverage, as T-Mobile would have it, the carrier doesn’t need “to present any objective data, because its analysis of its own network is sufficient,” it said.

T-Mobile argued in its brief that many years have passed since the court first held that Roswell’s denial of T-Mobile’s application “had the effect of prohibiting T-Mobile from providing personal wireless service. But neither the passage of time nor the introduction of new technologies “has done anything to remedy the significant gap in T-Mobile’s service,” said T-Mobile.

Drive tests measuring T-Mobile’s current wireless coverage reveal that the gap in service is now slightly larger than it was in 2017, “even applying a less stringent standard for what signal strength is needed,” said T-Mobile’s brief. Industry standard and widely accepted computer propagation modeling confirms its drive test results, it said. Key performance indicators, such as dropped calls, further corroborate the significant gap in service,” it said.

Time likewise hasn’t changed the fact that “feasible, less intrusive alternatives” to remedying the service gap aren’t available, said T-Mobile’s brief. The city has “no affirmative evidence” contradicting T-Mobile’s demonstrations that bear that out, it said.