Last week in his annual State of the Town address, Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski made a surprising announcement.

“Apparently, we’re ready to have cell service in Southold,” he deadpanned, as laughter filled a meeting room at Peconic Landing. “There seems to be consensus on that.”

The supervisor was talking about a new plan that aims to eliminate the sprawling patchwork of cellphone coverage gaps spread throughout Southold, which have plagued the town for decades — including full signal blackouts on Fishers Island and persistent dead zones along the town’s waterfronts and, for many, along the Main Road corridor that runs through downtown.

Last month, the Southold Town Board was presented with the results of a consultant’s study. The 90-page draft proposes a 10-year strategy to expand commercial and public safety cell service throughout the town, including the addition of new towers and small cell antennas in areas where terrain, vegetation or strict zoning rules currently block reliable signal coverage.

The draft plan will incorporate feedback from a new poll of the community that the town has initiated to create new zoning code that Southold officials hope will “incentivize the cell carriers to improve our service, whether through new cell towers, small cell technology or a combination of the both.” Residents and business owners have until Aug. 13 to complete the survey.

“We’re really looking for reliable service, and it has escaped us so far,” Krupski said. “So we’re actively seeking input, and then we can engage with the carriers.”  

Beyond the frustration it generates, safety is at stake. 80% of the nation’s 240 million annual 911 emergency calls come from cell phones.

‘Everyone knows’

Southold is all too familiar with cell service interruptions.

“Everyone knows ‘oh, you’re in Southold. We can’t hear each other,” said JMcLaughlin manager Susan Heidtmann, a mother of three, who said she hits dead zones on Main Road all the time.

“When I’m passing IGA, I lose my family members.”

The poor coverage affects her customers, too. “I always let them use my landline because they can’t make a call out,” she said. “I do that a lot.”

Chris James from Blue Water Lures said that Mattituck is no friend to T-Mobile cell phones, especially the beaches and the public boat launch, where he said his coverage is “absolutely atrocious.”

 “If I go to Goldsmiths or Mattituck — forget it,” he said.

Even with a fiber optic Wi-Fi at the tackle shop, he said — and a cell tower down the road at the police department — recent changes have somehow made connectivity worse for customers.

“I used to be able to let them log on to my Wi-Fi here … I went fiber optic a couple months ago, and I can’t get people to log on. They can’t, for some reason.”

Southold resident Ralph DeFillipis said unreliable cell service is “part of my daily micro frustrations.

“I’ll put on music or a podcast to relax just for a minute at a time — and there’s gaps. It kind of just builds the anxiety a little bit.”

‘Victims of our own success’

Southold’s longtime former Town Supervisor Scott Russell said last week that the town’s new plan is long overdue — but he cautioned that the effort may be hobbled by changing technology and a difficult return on investment for major carriers in rural communities.

“The problem is that there are so many topography challenges along the water,” Russell said in an interview. “There are dead spots … it’s not just the infrastructure that exists. It’s the infrastructure that you have to put in that’s going to make it difficult to reach everywhere.”

Russell, who served as supervisor for 18 years before stepping down at the end of 2023, welcomed the effort but said the town helped create its own problem years ago by passing a restrictive cell tower law.  

“We passed a code that was so strict it invariably ended up discouraging the very things we now need, which are cell towers,” Russell said. “Unfortunately, we were the victims of our own success.”

The law limited tower height, restricted their location to areas like industrial zones and subjected proposals to a rigorous review process.

 “Obviously, you don’t want them going in willy-nilly,” he said. “At the same time … every time someone proposed a cell tower, the community went nuts.”

Russell said one of his own proposals for a tower behind Southold Town Hall was scuttled by public opposition. “I tried putting a cell tower behind Town Hall on separate property in the back that we weren’t using … downtown Southold is one of the deadest spots in all of Southold.”

Russell said his proposal aimed to improve coverage, generate revenue from leasing tower space to carriers and ensure resiliency in storms or disasters like 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.

“During Sandy … there just wasn’t sufficient backup power to keep the repeaters working,” he said.

The former supervisor said an effort to pass a local law requiring that cell towers have at least 24 hours of battery or generator backup was preempted by federal law. “So I thought, if we put a tower on town property, then as a landlord, we could simply require it,” he said.

That effort failed, and the tower was instead built on nearby private land.

“Literally, you’re talking about 300 yards,” Russell said. “We could have had that tower sitting on town property, generating income, generating better coverage.”

Another challenge now, the former supervisor said, is that technology — and the industry’s business model — has shifted.

While community opposition to towers has faded, he said, major carriers are no longer focused on large, high towers. “They are looking more at what they call handoff technology, or the smaller mini cells that they want to scatter throughout communities.”

These mini cells, Russell said, require close proximity — as little as every 300 to 1,000 feet — which makes them prohibitively expensive in a rural, spread-out town like Southold.

“It’s a very costly proposition when you’re not going to pick up a lot of customers,” he said.

“That’s why you see them popping up in villages up west — Lindenhurst, Babylon, Bay Shore — because you can put infrastructure up and hit a lot of customers with much less investment. In Southold, that ratio isn’t there.”

Russell recalled a failed tower effort in Laurel nearly a decade ago, where the tower was built on speculation — with no carriers committed.

“The guy that was building the tower didn’t have any tenants lined up. He was building a spec tower … That tower went up and to this day, coverage hasn’t improved because the very carriers this company said were going to locate there never did.”

Wireless balancing act

The draft plan begins with a sobering assessment of Southold’s existing wireless network. There are currently 19 commercial wireless facilities serving the town, 16 of them within Southold’s zoning authority and three just outside its borders, including two in Greenport Village.

Using signal strength simulations based on LTE standards, the report maps coverage across the town — and identifies where it drops off, especially along the north and south shores, on remote peninsulas and across Fishers Island, where signals degrade rapidly or disappear altogether.

Coverage gaps are especially pronounced in the summer, when the town’s population swells.

“Additional sites will be necessary to expand coverage, increase capacity, and meet the seasonal demand placed on the existing network,” the report states.

To address these problems, the town’s consultants mapped out two long-term build-out scenarios.

The first scenario calls for seven new macro towers to fill in the most significant gaps. The second scenario would add 28 small cell installations — compact antennas mounted on utility poles or streetlights — to reach areas where zoning or topography make tower construction impractical.

Both strategies include upgrades to existing infrastructure. The plan recommends increasing the height of a tower in Peconic from 145 to 199 feet and replacing an 80-foot utility pole in central Southold with a 120-foot tower to expand service range and allow more carriers to share equipment.

Two new macro towers are proposed for Fishers Island, which currently has only one concealed base station inside a church steeple — and service from just one of the four major U.S. carriers.

The plan notes that the island cannot support adequate coverage without additional infrastructure, and that small cell installations along East Main Road could supplement macro tower service in more difficult terrain.

Plum Island, which is federal property and not under town zoning authority, will remain a cellular dead zone under either scenario.

Southold’s zoning code currently restricts tower height to 80 feet in some districts and just 45 feet in others — far below the height of many of the town’s dense oak and holly canopies, though Krupski said those codes will be revised.

While the town encourages unipole towers that conceal antennas in cylindrical shrouds, these structures suffer from a critical flaw: they force the radios that power the antennas to be installed at ground level, degrading signal strength by up to 30%.

That loss in performance means more towers — not fewer — may be needed to maintain service in visually sensitive areas.

A taller, non-concealed tower — or even a different concealed design that allows radios and antennas to be mounted together — can more than double the coverage area compared to a shorter, shrouded tower. But such designs can be more visible, and unsightly in a rural environment.

“This setup enables stronger signals, broader coverage, and greater flexibility to support evolving network demands,” the report states.

But it acknowledges the tradeoff.

“While shorter concealed towers may reduce visual impact, they come with … reduced wireless coverage, limited capacity for future collocations and higher deployment costs.”

Adding urgency is the rapid evolution of wireless technology. Carriers are still building out 5G networks, and 6G deployment is expected by 2030.