Finally Internet on the Train? New Move by the Ministry of Communications
The Ministry of Communications is promoting updated coverage and service quality obligations to eliminate reception gaps along roads and railway tracks. The new rules will require operators to ensure continuous signal connectivity.
The Ministry of Communications is promoting updated coverage and service quality obligations designed to increase the availability and performance of cellular networks, including along roads and railway tracks. The ministry published the proposed obligations today (Wednesday) and invites cellular providers and the public to submit their comments.
"Cellular networks are essential infrastructure, and the frequencies allocated to them are a valuable and limited public resource," the ministry stated. "In order to maximize frequency utilization and improve network quality, the Ministry of Communications believes that coverage and quality instructions must be updated, as the existing license obligations were set about a decade ago and are based on metrics from previous generations. In light of technological developments, the transition to 4G and 5G networks, and public inquiries pointing to reception gaps, the ministry proposes a comprehensive update of the existing regulation. The goal is to ensure that the public receives available, continuous, and high-quality service, while creating clear rules that can be monitored and enforced."
Continuity of reception on the road
A major change the ministry is promoting concerns the continuity of reception while traveling. "One of the common sources of user frustration stems from dropped calls or the loss of browsing capability while traveling on intercity roads. With the aim of providing a practical solution, it is proposed to change the supervision mechanism on long routes (roads and railway tracks), so that instead of examining the general coverage percentage as an average of the entire road length, the obligation will be examined continuously over every 20 km segment," it was reported.
According to the ministry's proposal, along a 20 km travel segment on intercity roads, the areas where there is no reception will not exceed 200 meters in total. The implementation of this requirement will also have a direct impact on reception on Israel Railways, most of whose main tracks run along these roads. On local roads, the ministry seeks to determine that a continuous travel segment without coverage of more than 500 meters will not be allowed.
Indoor vs. outdoor coverage
At the same time, the ministry seeks to cancel the indoor coverage obligation and tighten the requirement for the outdoor reception threshold: "Instructions regarding the mandatory reception threshold inside buildings are problematic from a regulatory perspective. Signal penetration is affected by building materials, wall thickness, exact location in the building, and other parameters that change from time to time and from place to place and are not under the operators' control. Therefore, the ministry is considering canceling this obligation and adopting an approach, accepted in many countries around the world, of defining stricter values for reception thresholds outside buildings, which takes into account signal attenuation when penetrating a building."
The ministry also proposes to tighten regulations for the rate of blocked or dropped calls, and to determine that the maximum threshold for each of them will not exceed 1% per hour, compared to 2% under current requirements.
"This move is part of the ministry's work plan, which is intended to bring about a quantum leap in the quality of cellular infrastructure in Israel," the Ministry of Communications stated. "Alongside updating the coverage obligations, the ministry is currently promoting a series of complementary measures, including removing barriers to antenna installation, making public assets accessible for site construction, clearing additional frequencies, expanding enforcement measures through test drives, and establishing a transparency system that will present the public with a real coverage map."
