City keen on Coupland’s ‘ V- Poles’

To clear its streets of cellphone towers, parking meters, Wi- Fi terminals, street lights and even community message boards, the city of Vancouver is pushing forward with a scheme to compress all the technologies together into specialized “Vancouver poles” planted throughout the city.

“Meet your inevitable future,” wrote novelist Douglas Coupland, the technology’s creator, in an introductory Tweet.

Alongside Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, the author unveiled the “V- Pole” concept technology last week at the New Cities Summit in Paris, France. “You would never think of building a house or office tower without electricity — in the same way, you would never think of developing future cities without ‘ V- Poles,’ ” said Coupland in a statement.

The device, no larger than a telephone pole, would manage cell signals for multiple carriers, as well as wireless Internet for the surrounding neighbourhood. In- ground pads plugged into the pole would provide inductive charging for parked electric cars. An integrated touch screen would display maps, ads or payment interfaces, and an LED street light would be perched at the top of the pole.

“You could pay for parking, you could pay for electric vehicle charging, that kind of thing,” said Sadhu Johnston, Vancouver’s deputy city manager.

The core of the V- Pole is light-radio, a device developed jointly by Bell Labs and telecommunications giant Alcatel- Lucent that compresses all the wires and circuit boards of a cellphone tower into a single Rubik’s cube- sized block. “You can stack them inside a pole like Lego,” said Mr. Coupland.

A friend of Robertson, Coupland said the idea came up a year ago when the pair were discussing city efforts to address an encroaching forest of cellphone towers.