T-Mobile and APC Towers have filed a lawsuit against City of Wichita over a denied conditional use application to construct an 80-foot wireless communication facility near 18th and Woodland.
T-Mobile says it suffers from a significant gap in its ability to provide service in the North Riverside neighborhood, driven primarily by inadequate network capacity to serve consumer demand.
The carrier claims that more than half of America’s homes have “cut the cord”, and to provide services that customers demand, the wireless provider must build facilities that will provide wireless signal coverage and also adequate network capacity to accommodate the radical increase in use.
But to do that, T-Mobile said it must construct more wireless facilities and those facilities must be in the areas where consumers demand service and with network capacity to accommodate the use.
T-Mobile said it had applied for a previous location, but came up against resident resistance because of aesthetics. It then found the second site that was voted on by the City Council on May 14, 2019, 5-2 on a NIMBY concern.
T-Mobile says the denial of the conditional use permit violates the Declaratory Order passed by the FCC on September 27, 2018.
The complaint is available here.
