07.12.2022

“We have successfully completed a new campaign aimed at verifying the coverage with mobile voice services and I am glad to announce that all operators have fulfilled their obligation to cover 98% of Romania’s population. Thus, according to the field measurements, RCS&RDS covers with mobile voice services 98.8% of the total population, Orange Romania – 98.5%, Telekom Mobile 98.5%, and Vodafone Romania – 98.4%. Besides the mobile operators’ interest in the Romanian market, I believe that the measurements made by ANCOM and transposed into the aisemnal.ro map have significantly contributed to reaching this target. As well, in order to support the users and the operators, alongside updating the aisemnal.ro platform, we developed the aisemnal.ro app for the Android și iOS operation systems, which can be downloaded free of charge from the app stores“, Cristin Popa, executive director at ANCOM, said.

This year’s campaign concludes an important stage in the verification of the coverage obligations. After all the mobile telephony operators have been repeatedly sanctioned with warnings and fines, currently the coverage obligations mentioned in the licences issued by ANCOM in 2013 are fully fulfilled. The coverage obligation is a permanent one and will be monitored by ANCOM until the expiry of the licence validity period, respectively 5 April 2029, through annual national measurement campaigns.

The 2022 coverage verification campaign

The campaign on measuring the national coverage with mobile voice services took place between May and October 2022, the signal coverage of the localities being measured by crossing the accessible roads, the boulevards, and the main and side streets.

A total of 13,388 localities with more than 10 inhabitants were verified during the campaign, and more than 240,000 km of national, county, city and commune roads were crossed. Out of the 20,121,587 of inhabitants, according to the population and households census, the areas inhabited by 20,116,846 persons were measured. The voice coverage was calculated as the ratio between the sum of the covered population and Romania’s total population.

The comparative results of the measurements performed during the campaigns on monitoring the mobile voice service national coverage are available in the table below:

 

 

According to the licences they hold, Orange, Vodafone and Telekom Mobile had the obligation to cover with voice services - by means of their own radio access networks - the areas inhabited by at least 98% of Romania’s population by 5 April 2017, and RCS&RDS by 5 April 2019.

The aisemnal app and platform

Beside the updating of the aisemnal.ro platform with the results of this year’s campaign and the addition of new functions to it, apps for Android and iOS operation systems were developed, which can be downloaded free of charge from the app stores. Thus, the users have a new source at their disposal to check the signal coverage in Romania.

Furthermore, the possibility of 3D view of the digital surface model based on the EU-DEM Copernicus https://land.copernicus.eu/imagery-in-situ/eu-dem was implemented.

Both the aisemnal.ro platform and the aisemnal.ro app allow the users to follow the evolution of the mobile voice signal coverage in 2022 compared to 2019, 2020 and 2021, while also enabling them to consult the cumulated coverage with mobile communications services at national level.

As well, the map includes the localities which feature a risk of inadvertent roaming and the Bucharest metro signal coverage map.