Two bureaucrats tangling over the intricacies of wireless networks may not seem like the stuff of headlines but this week’s debate between two FCC commissioners could shape the future of how we use our smartphones for decades to come.

Mignon Clyburn and Michael O’Rielly sat awkwardly next to each other on stage at Mobile World Congress Americas, the wireless industry’s big new bash, in San Francisco this week. They were part of a panel discussion along with new Trump-appointed commissioner Brendan Carr, as well as Meredith Attwell Baker, who heads the CTIA wireless trade association that put on the show. The seating arrangement—Clyburn to the left and O’Rielly to the right—fit their roles as vocal proponents of the commission’s political wings.

Having battled over topics like net neutrality and cable boxes, they now groused about the FCC’s latest dull-but-important controversy: the placement of transmitters for the new 5G wireless networks arriving in two or three years. Installing up to 300,000 cellular antennas—double what the U.S. currently has—in so little time is leading to a clash between overwhelmed local zoning officials and impatient industry and Trump administration officials, with Clyburn and O’Rielly fighting for each side.

The single-digit upgrade from “4G” to “5G” belies the massive technological change it will bring and the havoc it may wreak. Not only will 5G be a lot faster, it will also be ubiquitous—ranging from instantaneous, high-bandwidth connections for drones and robo cars to trickles of data from billions of temperature and moisture sensors. That requires scrounging for additional electromagnetic spectrum—pinching some from TV broadcasters, for instance, and also harnessing crummy “millimeter-wave” frequencies that can transmit only a few feet and not always make it around corners. “Many of these bands, just a few years ago, was dog spectrum,” said Clyburn. Making it workable requires placing “small cell” transmitters all over urban landscapes—with a size and density more like Wi-Fi hotspots than big, far-reaching cell towers.

Related: The Wild Technology That Will Make 5G Wireless Work

But the bureaucracy is the same, say wireless industry boosters, with as much paperwork and cost for approving a small cell on a lamppost as for raising a 30- or 60-foot pole. Industry execs like to quote the figure that it takes a year to approve a cell that can be installed in an hour. Permit fees run to thousands of dollars per cell, and cells often require permits not only from cities but from Native American tribal authorities—even for locations far from tribal lands. At another talk during the show, Sprint’s VP of government affairs, Charles McKee, said that the company spent $173,000, just in tribal review fees, to install 23 small cells in the parking around the Houston Astrodome. Tribal authorities come in under the National Historic Preservation Act, even for a parking lot.

Local governments are trying to squeeze wireless carriers, say critics, with concessions for permits such as requiring carriers to install all new streetlights where a small cell goes up, to build a free municipal Wi-Fi network, or to pay 5% of gross revenues earned in the city. Some cities require even these small cells to be installed on poles that masquerade as cacti or other trees.