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Committee forwards lease for cellular equipment at Zuckerberg San Francisco General amid 5G questions
Summary
The Budget and Finance Committee voted to send a lease for equipment room space at Zuckerberg San Francisco General (Building 25) to the full Board with a positive recommendation, while staff said the hospital's current distributed antenna system supports 4G and that 5G deployment will require separate future infrastructure.
Chair Malia Cohen opened discussion of Item 1, a resolution authorizing a lease of part of the equipment room at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (Building 25, 1001 Potrero Avenue) with GTE Mobile Net of California Limited Partnership at a monthly base rate of $5,000. The committee voted to forward the item to the full Board with a positive recommendation after discussion and public comment was closed.
Committee members raised the hospital's future access to 5G technology. Chair Cohen said she wanted Zuckerberg San Francisco General to “be the first, not the last in the line for technological upgrades,” arguing that a hospital that provides life-saving services should have up-to-date communications capability.
Eric Schafer, representing the Department of Public Health, said the building’s current system is a distributed antenna system (DAS) designed for radios and lower-bandwidth services. “The DAS was originally designed for EMS and police radios,” Schafer said, adding that the DAS now in place handles current 4G standards but that 5G operates on different, higher-frequency bands and will require upgrades both at local transmitters and at the head-end equipment in the building basement. Schafer described 5G as nascent technology that will likely require three to five years of citywide planning and vendor coordination before broad deployment.
Schafer and the committee agreed that the lease under consideration is not an immediate 5G deployment and that any future 5G work would require separate infrastructure investments and coordination with the city's technology offices and commercial carriers. The committee took the motion to forward the lease to the full Board without objection; a subsequent procedural rescission and reissue took place later in the meeting but left the committee recommendation intact.
The next formal step is review by the full Board of Supervisors. The committee record notes that public comment on the item was closed at the meeting and that no public speakers spoke against the measure.
