Telcos blame high rise buildings for terrible networks?

An insider to the mobile telecommunication industry has revealed that the persistent bad service by network operators in the country is blamable on ‘high rise buildings’ scattered around the country which are seriously interrupting their network transmissions and reliability.

Speaking in an interview with the Daily Express on sidelines of a workshop in Accra, Mr. Raymond Folly, the Network Planning Engineer at Airtel Ghana said there is a multi part shading system that blocks signal from one tower to the other and they normally go through a lot of systems.


According to him when you have a tall building in between signals and the end user, this automatically weakens the signal delivered to the end user. He explained that this is because the building interrupts the signal and reflects it back to the tower.


The workshop was on the theme: ‘Ghana’s media knowledge series on data.’ It was organized by Airtel Ghana. This series was one of the four series Airtel Ghana plans to organize for the media, this year.


Mr. Folly noted that when the signal hits these high rise buildings it does not get to where it was intended to get to and that affects most of networks’ service transmission to their customers.


The Daily Express has gathered that in an attempt to resolve this problem, most of the telcos in the country are deploying, fibre-optic cables which they believe have the capacity to reduce issue of multi part shading.

He stated that this was a general concern among the telecom operators especially at the point where they share network infrastructure.


He said with regard to microwave communication which relies solely on line of site, when there is a high rise building between either lines of site, the signal get broken, resulting in poor service.


Mr. Folly indicated that when a signal fails as a result of a high rise building, it forces them to move or direct the signal through other means, at an exorbitant cost.


He said currently, most of the operators are sharing network infrastructure and one tower accommodates two or three network operators.


He added that depending on the level of the tower, if a particular network’s signal is located at the higher end of the tower, such an operator will be assured of a good signal to its clients. But an operator whose signal generator is located at the lower end of the tower, is likely to suffer signal problems because of the signal generated will hit the building and revert to the receiver. “This makes the end user receiver weaker,” he added.