07.01.2020

“During a dedicated monitoring campaign, we verified mobile voice coverage in approximately 13,400 localities, i.e. in all the localities with more than 10 inhabitants, and along more than 246,000 km of national, county, city and village roads. None of the operators providing mobile voice services has fulfilled the obligation to ensure coverage with such services in areas inhabited by at least 98% of Romania’s population, therefore we have applied fines totalling RON 1,610,000, based on the coverage achieved by each operator. These obligations accompany the operators’ rights provided in the frequency usage licences and they must be fulfilled. We will perform the monitoring campaign again this year and we will keep applying sanctions until the obligations are fulfilled. All the measurement results are available on www.aisemnal.ro“, declared Cristin Popa, executive director of ANCOM.

Campaign results

The campaign for measuring the national coverage with mobile voice services was performed during May – September 2019. Signal coverage was measured along accessible roads, avenues and main roads, as well as along the secondary roads in a locality, for homogeneous measurements throughout the locality. Voice service coverage was calculated as a ratio of the total population covered to the total population measured.

“Following the Authority’s measurements, Orange Romania covered 97.81% of the total population with mobile telephony services, Vodafone Romania – 97.76%, Telekom Romania Mobile Communications – 96.53%, and RCS&RDS – 95.42%. Based on the percentage of the population covered by each operator, we sanctioned RCS&RDS by a RON 800,000 fine, Telekom Mobile by RON 700,000, Vodafone by RON 60,000, and Orange by RON 50,000“, Cristin Popa showed.

Operators’ obligations

According to the licences granting frequency usage rights, Orange, Vodafone and Telekom Mobile had the obligation to ensure voice service coverage in areas inhabited by at least 98% of Romania’s population by means of their own wireless access network, by 5 April 2017, while RCS&RDS had the obligation to ensure such coverage by 5 April 2019.

The mobile coverage map - www.aisemnal.ro

For the users’ easy access to the latest data on the voice coverage ensured by all the operators in the Romanian market, ANCOM has created an interactive map based on the measurements made within the campaign of measuring the national coverage with mobile voice services.

The national mobile coverage map – www.aisemnal.ro – is an information platform which enables users to find out exactly the coverage degree and the level of 2G, 3G and 4G signal for each of the mobile operators active on the Romanian market. Since the launch of this interactive map, the dedicated website has been accessed more than 1,500,000 times.

The map is easy to use: to check an operator’s coverage at national level, the users must select the operator and one or several technologies (2G, 3G or 4G). Users interested in checking the signal level in a certain locality must select the locality concerned. The map also enables finding the users’ location to check the signal coverage in the place where the user is. By means of the map available at www.aisemnal.ro, all interested persons can see which are the localities with the best mobile signal and those with the weakest signal, the levels of the indoor and outdoor signal or the white areas. The users thus have a full and accurate picture of the mobile signal coverage across the country.