Students walking near near Sonoma State University’s Stevenson Hall lately might have seen several more construction workers than expected. This recent construction is because new cell phone towers are being installed on the west side of the building.
The cell tower being installed near Stevenson Hall is a temporary tower to replace the current tower. The new temporary tower is up and running and was built for AT&T.
“What they’re doing is switching the cell signal from the cell towers that are on the Stevenson Hall roof to these remote cell towers that are now knotted on the ground next to the building,” said John Duke, Sonoma State’s director of operations and engineering. “The purpose of doing that is so that they can pull the equipment off the roof and allow us to re-roof the section of Stevenson Hall.”
The roof of Stevenson Hall is scheduled to be replaced over the summer because of a leak, according to Duke.
“If you look on top of Stevenson, there are three cell carriers presently up there: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint.” said Duke.
All three carriers have to move their equipment so that the workers can do roof work at Stevenson Hall.
“In order to do that, they are going to decommission their equipment at that time,” said Duke. “They are putting these temporary remote towers until this roof work takes place, then they will be decommissioned.”
There’sanother tower that will be installed on the north side of Stevenson Hall. The T-Mobile cell tower will be built on the north side in the grassy field between the art building and Stevenson Hall. Sprint has equipment on top of Stevenson along with the other two cell services. According to Duke, Sprint says at this point they will try to run their equipment in place while the work is happening on the roof and will not plan on putting a temporary tower on the ground.
The current AT&T tower on the west side of Stevenson Hall still has a piece of equipment that needs to be installed but is currently active. There will be a crane outside of Stevenson Hall pulling equipment off to prepare for the repairing of the leaking roof.
The roof is going out to public bid in the next couple weeks to find the company best suitable for the job. The roof will be replaced this summer and the temporary towers will be inactivated once the job is complete.
