Monday, August 13, 2012

Radiation From Mobile Towers

A review of available scientific information by a panel of experts shows that “electromagnetic radiation interferes with the biological systems”.  Accordingly, the Environment Ministry has asked the Department of Telecommunications not to allow new mobile towers to be constructed within a one-kilometre radius of the existing towers.
There has been widespread concern that radiation from such towers is responsible for the declining population of birds such as sparrows, and bees which are vital for the pollination of many plant species and hence a key part of both agricultural economy and natural ecosystems.
 This has been paralleled by unease among some urban residents over the effect of mobile tower radiation in their own neighborhoods, prompting the PMO to set up a panel last month, mandated to work out a new set of guidelines to prevent the adverse impact of such radiation in tune with global norms.
The Hindu: Concerned at radiation, Ministry asks DoT not to allow overlapping mobile towers

1 comment:

Arvind said...

This is totally bogus because if you have full coverage in an area, the electromagnetic waves already reach all over the place. So the number of towers is irrelevant.

However, there is one important aspect where the number of towers matters. In order to keep the spectrum a scarce resource, you need to prevent the number of towers from increasing. Otherwise, small players would get into the field and compete with the big players.

If you know how the cell phone system works, a geographical area is broken up into cells and no two neighboring cells use the same frequencies. However, go one more cell away and the same frequency can be reused.

In areas with a high population density, the cell size is small allowing the system to accommodate more people. To accommodate more players too, small cell sizes will help because the number of frequencies that can be reused by a cell will increase.

An argument of the big players involved in the 2G scam is that spectrum is a scarce resource. This argument has been made in the Supreme Court.