3G users likely to be the worst affected

CHENNAI: The new radiation norms for cellphone towers may be good for your health, but there is a flip side no one's talking about. Consumers across telecom networks may experience inferior voice quality, increase in call drops and congestion in coming months as companies rejig networks to decrease the power supplied to their transmission towers.

The new norms for towers, which came into effect on September 1, have made the radiation limit more stringent by reducing it from 9.2 W/sq m to 0.92 W/sq m, a 10-fold decrease. It is lower than the US (12 W/sq m) and higher than China (0.4 W/sq m) and Russia (0.2 W/sq m).

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. When we move from the vicinity of one tower to another while on a call, the phone searches for the closest tower and call duties are 'handed over' to the new tower by the network. "More towers mean your phone will search and switch between towers much more frequently than before, leading to more call drops. Up to 5% of calls can get dropped due to increased handovers," said the chief technology officer of a leading telecom tower equipment maker who did not wish to be quoted. "Subscribers will not be getting the same quality."

As companies try to move towers around or add new ones, gaps are also likely to emerge in the network, leading to insufficient coverage for both calls and data services. Most towers have both voice and data units.


"As a result of these measures, degraded services, higher congestion, lack of coverage and higher number of call drops will result for customers," said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI). Vodafone and Airtel didn't comment directly on the story and forwarded the queries from TOI to COAI.