Telecom towers told to reduce radiation from Sep 1

[Xen]

With growing concerns over the impact of mobile radiation on human health, the government on Friday asked telecom towers to reduce electromagnetic radiation to a tenth from from tomorrow.

This means, from September 1, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) will ensure the exposure limits (for radio frequency fields for 1800 Mhz) be brought down by a tenth to 0.92 watt per square metre, compared to the current standard of 9.2 watt per square meter. Telecom towers, or base stations, provide link to and from mobile phones through radiation.

There are 0.7 million towers through the country. The government on Friday issued guidelines on health hazards from tower radiation. Among other things, it says the minimum distance of a tower (with two antennae) from a residential building should be 35 metres.

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[Technoglitch]

i read an article that due to this reduction, mobile users might face drop in call quality along with data too.

 

[Xen]

It actually happening. Vodafone and Airtel users are facing hus " Call Blank " & " Call Drop " issues.

I am myself facing this issue since last week. Since Last 7 days, I was getting " GPRS " instead of " EDGE " on my Blackberry. But now EDGE is back and so is some speed. But call drop still exist.

 

[Technoglitch]

oh, i never experienced it

 

[Xen]

3G users likely to be the worst affected

There are around 4.5 lakh telecom towers in India, of which 5% (around 22,000 towers) currently don't meet new guidelines. Most of them are in core areas of Delhi and Mumbai and suburbs of cities like Bangalore and Chennai, apart from other tier-1 cities, said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).

To achieve the new norms without changing the entire infrastructure, telecom companies will manually decrease the power supplied to the towers, which will bring down radiation levels. While this solves the compliance problem, it means the coverage area of each tower goes down and more towers will be needed to cover the same area. This, in turn, will increase the number of 'handovers' required to complete a call.

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