Aspen Small Cell Infrastructure Design Guidelines

Challenge: The City of Aspen, Colorado needed assistance controlling the proliferation of small cell 4G and new 5G wireless telecommunications towers. They lacked a community strategic plan, vision, or any meaningful design guidelines to standardize small cell infrastructure. With ever-changing technology and regulatory developments, new design guidelines, carrier-neutral locations, land use, and building permit application timelines, and fees for small cell equipment were necessary in response to this rapidly changing landscape.

Solution: The city wanted to create a design guideline document that will outline and standardize small cell wireless applications within the City of Aspen both on private property and within the public right-of-way. The City identified the current small cell infrastructure, 5G locations, including fiber optics; traffic signal and street light placement; intelligent infrastructure, and related municipal assets in geospatial layers to more effectively manage public rights-of-way.

To develop a strategic view of the City’s telecommunications and small cell policies and placement meetings were held with telecommunication providers and regional stakeholders, including the local power company, as well as Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, incumbent broadband providers, neighboring communities, key internal City staff, and regional emergency agencies.