Re: Can someone dumb this down for me...
Pretty much. It's not actually a new idea, essentially the same principles apply for things like power and telephone lines. The main difference is that it's extremely rare for anyone to want to build a power line directly through your back garden, so the only people it really affects are farmers and other landowners in rural areas. Hence the clause about being adequately compensated with just money - loss of working land is only really an issue due to the lost income, and most farmers would be very happy to accept an equivalent amount of guaranteed rent in replacement.
It only starts becoming an issue because things like mobile masts can't just be put on posts along the street because they need line of sight, which in urban areas means on tall buildings. So instead of just taking a corner of a field and paying for the lost crops, you're now demanding that people accept having structural changes, wiring, maintenance access, and so on forcibly applied to their property. Which not only makes it understandable why people might object, but also a lot trickier to figure out if solely monetary compensation is adequate, and if so how much. "This field produces crops worth £x per m^2 and you've taken y m^2" is pretty easy. Sticking an antenna on the corner of a building causes some hassle but not usually any direct monetary damage, but if things go badly it can potentially cause catastrophic damage.
So this probably isn't the last time it's going to end up in court. It's not really clear how sensible it is to apply the old principles directly to mobile masts, and especially mm-wave 5G ones. And even if you do so, it's not obvious exactly how to do it. As 5G rollouts grow in scale, there are likely to be a lot of arguments about exactly how and where they can do so.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
