Introduction

Why is it important for a mobile communications network provider to maintain compliance with established international health and safety guidelines for radiation?  The answer to this question resides in two domains:

• Good corporate governance requires absolute certainty that all employees work in safe environments.
• Legal risk exists in terms of liability for overexposure to radiation, whether by accident or improper control of working environments.

It is therefore critically important for mobile communication network providers to establish and maintain a safety guideline compliant network.

Radiation safety guidelines and measures required for compliance

The guidelines most widely accepted in industry for the assessment of radiation compliance are set and maintained by ICNIRP, the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.  These guidelines specify which levels of radiation are safe for humans to operate in.  Specific measures need to be in place for each transmitter to ensure that radiation zones are clearly marked and that access to such zones are controlled.  More detail...

Integrated Compliance Assessment System

Modern mobile communication networks typically consist of thousands of transmitters and are not static in design or layout.  A process is therefore required for the establishing of safety compliance status for all transmitters in a network.  This process should be carefully designed to cater for revisiting and managing of sites in the network when a site is modified to a new configuration of antennas.  Large amounts of data describing the physical location and transmission entities at each site are typically maintained in databases by network providers, all of which are required inputs to compliance assessment.  EMSS Consulting has the know-how and tools to integrate these databases with information gathered by surveying teams at radiation sites, tools to determine site compliance and tried and tested protocols for the maintanence of compliance databases.  More detail...

Routine Compliance Measurements

Once the radiation safety guideline compliance of a communication network has been established it has to be maintained with regular site visits to perform routine measurements and site evaluations.  We train and manage surveying teams to perform these measurements.  We have also developed a highly automated measurement process for these routine site visits that enable high quality measurements and daily uploads to the compliance database.  These uploads enable immediate automatic generation of site compliance reports to the client's specification.  More detail...