Bloomberg about Buergerwelle

Tirschenreuth, Germany, Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- From the Bavarian hinterland, a citizens' group is sending a warning Signal to Germany's mobile-phone industry.

Members of the Buergerwelle, or citizens' wave, believe that the electromagnetic radio frequencies given off by mobile phones and their transmission towers cause a range of health problems. And they are making their case in court.

Last September, Buergerwelle members were among the litigants who won a court judgment requiring Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobil unit to stop transmitting mobile Signals from a church tower in a Frankfurt suburb. A higher court will re-examine the case Dec. 20. The group says it has successfully blocked the construction of 200 other transmission towers in Germany.

A revolution comes forward? Siegfried Zwerenz, the Buegerwelle's chairman, would like to think so.

People are no longer prepared to allow themselves to be destroyed by the base stations, says the earnest Bavarian with a short brown mustache and lank hair.

So far, there is no scientific evidence to support fears that mobile phones cause cancer and other health problems. But the wave of protests threatens at the very least to slow construction of some mobile towers for high-capacity Systems in Germany, as well as in Switzerland and Italy, where scattered protests also have arisen.

Slowing the Rollout
If you are a telecommunications Company that has just paid billions for a license to offer rapid cellular Services, you need to roll out this network quickly and sign up customers as fast as possible in order for it to start paying off, says Conrad Roeber, a consultant with U.K.-based Spectrum Strategy Consultants. The protests are certainly having an effect, especially for small operators.

Industry officials don't see the Buergerwelle and its fellow travelers as a serious threat to the wireless communications giants. Still, the anti-mobile-phone lobby is making its mark.

The Buergerwelle tries to scare people, to make them uncertain about mobile-phone technology, says Fritz Lauer, a Deutsche Telekom engineer who also acts as the spokesman for the Company's environmental department. We take a very critical view of these tactics so we don't have any direct dealings with them.

Some cell-phone protesters in Germany are turning to violence. While Deutsche Telekom denies that its towers have been hit, Vodafone Group Plc's Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH unit confirms that a small handful of its 12,000 transmitters have been damaged by arson, cable-cutting and other means.

Incidents of Violence
Zwerenz insists that the Buergerwelle is keeping its fight legal.

I don't know who did those things, Zwerenz says. We distance ourselves from any type of violence. At the same time we can understand those people. What has begun, people destroying towers by cutting the cables, or burning them, that will escalate.

The organization's members believe that electrosmog -- its term for electro-magnetic radio frequency waves -- causes sleeplessness, anemia and even cancer. Protesters say some studies on cells and lab animals show that large doses of mobile emissions cause genetic changes that could increase susceptibility to some cancers. The charges are widely disputed by the medical establishment, which has not been able to replicate those studies.

The Buergerwelle has 3,000-plus German members, and sister organizations in Switzerland, Italy, Luxembourg and Austria. Its annual budget: 25,000 Deutsche marks ($10,800). Deutsche Telekom's net income in 1999: 1.2 billion euros ($1 billion).

The telecommunications companies, such as Deutsche Telekom, MobilCom AG, Mannesmann and others, won't say what the skirmishes cost them, but it certainly adds up.

We don't publicize those figures, Lauer said. But we do give out several million marks to support research on the possible health effects of mobile phones and cover our personnel costs.

Pulling the Plug
Zwerenz, who works as a natural healer, also focuses on the effects of cordless telephones in homes, and the electro-magnetic emissions he believes they give off.

He describes a typical house call.

Sometimes there will be a cordless phone in the home which gives off a pulsed high frequency transmission twenty-four hours a day, Zwerenz says. This disturbs both children and adults, so the therapy consists of pulling the plug out of the socket.

His crusade began in 1997 while he was touring the Bavanan countryside. He learned, he said, that cows grazing in fields near the wireless transmission towers had still-birth and abortion rates 10 to 15 times greater than the average rate. He claims some children living on these farms even developed cancerous brain tumors.

No Scientific Evidence
The scientific establishment sees the Situation differently.

If people have an unexplained health complaint, and they live near a base Station they tend to blame it for their problem, says Michael Repacholi, who heads the Worid Health Organization's International Electro-Magnetic Field Project.

But there is no scientific evidence which supports the link between mobile phones and cancer.

For Zwerenz, the connection is clear.
I said to myself, Look, I have this knowledge, I may as well use it to help people, he recalled in the sunny timber and glass studio he started bullding with the help of his wife and three children in 1994.

He became chairman of the Buegerwelle, which was founded in 1998, in February of last year. Now, he speaks at least once a week to citizens' groups about the dangers he perceives in mobile-phone frequencies. The cause has forced him to neglect his home-renovation work, and his practice.

Constructing More Towers
Citizen concerns about health effects of mobile towers could intensify, analysts said, as more towers are constructed to carry Video and voice transmissions on the frequencies currently being auctioned off across Europe. The auctions have raised more than 100 billion euros for European governments.

A recent survey by Switzerland's Cash weekly found that 48 percent of respondents didn't want a mobile phone tower near their homes. (The respondents, two-thirds of whom were mobile phone owners, had no plans to go give up their cell phones.)

So the mobile-phone towers will continue to go up. Deutsche Telekom alone plans to operate 25,000 by 2005, and Switzerland will have about 16,000 by the time its high-capacity Video and voice System is complete.

Italians, 67 percent of whom own a mobile phone, embody the same internal conflict äs the Swiss. They love their mobiles, but aren't so crazy about the towers. Even before the new round of towers goes up, protests are growing.

Permission Takes Longer
It is certainly having an effect, says Roeber, the U.K. consultant. One of their smaller operators, Blu SpA, is having enormous difficulty in bullding up its network, but this doesn't effect the overall industry, because bigger players already have their Systems in place.

Giorgio DiStefano, who is responsible for regulatory issues at Blu, says Opposition to the towers means that it now takes six to nine months to recelve permission to set one up, more than twice the amount of time it took two years ago. Sometimes the requests are rejected outright.

As a result, its very hard to deploy a national network, DiStefano says. In Florence, in Bologna, no one has been able to build anything for the last six months.

Carlo Fornaro, spokesman for Omnitel Pronto Italia SpA, Italy's second largest mobile phone Service, confirms that it has become more difficult for mobile phone providers to set up transmission towers in Bologna and other northern Italian cities.

In one of life's happy coincidences, Zwerenz is unlikely to have to worry about more base stations in Tirschenreuth, pop. 10,000. Deutsche Telekom says rural areas with less than 25,000 inhabitants won't be covered by the high-capacity mobile-phone network in the first construction round, which ends in 2005.

--Alfred Kueppers in the Frankfurt newsroom, (49 69) 92041 212 or akueppers@bloomberg.net, with reporting by Eric Sylvers in Milan/aes
Story illustration: {DTE GY <Equity> GP D <GO>} to graph Deutsche Telekom's share-price movement over the past 52 weeks.
To view the Buergerwelle's bi-lingual Web Site, type www.buergerwelle.com
To view the Worid Health Organization's International Electro-Magnetic Field Project, type www.who.int/peh-emf/
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