Globe to strengthen campaign against illegal repeaters

MANILA, Philippines - Globe Telecom Inc. believes that the ban imposed by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) on the sale and use of repeaters and portable cell site equipment would help providers improve their services to subscribers.

Froilan Castelo, head of corporate and legal services group of Globe, said the company’s campaign against illegal users would be given more teeth by a memorandum order issued earlier by NTC commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba laying down the guidelines on the prohibition of portable cellular mobile repeater and portable cell site equipment.

The order prohibits the sale, purchase, importation, possession or use of cellular mobile repeaters and portable cell sites operating on 800 megahertz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, and 2100 MHz frequency bands.

Portable cell sites and portable radio equipment or devices refer to radio equipment capable of sending messages to all subscribers within a radius of three kilometers to five kilometers providing an instant network in a “box solution.”

On the other hand, cellular mobile repeaters in the form of indoor or outdoor antennas and wireless adapters refer to devices that receive signal and regenerate the signals from one receiver to another.

“The NTC order is a welcome move since by laying down the guidelines on the prohibition of illegal repeaters, we believe that there will be less people who would sell, purchase, and use these equipment,” Castelo stressed.

For over a year now, he pointed out that Globe has been relentlessly going after users and sellers of illegal repeaters which have been causing dropped calls and poor reception.

However, while Republic Act 3846 or the Radio Control Law is already in place, there is still a need for clearer guidelines to minimize if not prevent their harmful interference to cellular mobile networks.

While nobody wants a weak mobile phone signal, he pointed out that using equipment to boost signal coverage could result in a lot of damage and trouble to other parties.

Since the said devices are usually out of the official radio spectrum specifications, they cause network interference, leaving subscribers in the area with very weak, if not non-existent mobile reception.

These illegal repeaters are also not calibrated or tuned to the right frequency or to the right settings thus stepping on legitimate and good signal adjacent to it.

For instance, he pointed out that a businessman in Binangonan was found to be using an illegal repeater to manage his trucking and warehousing business.

Since his residence is in front of a cell site, the device unintentionally interfered with the signal being emitted by the cell site resulting in poor reception for subscribers.

Repeaters are not actually prohibited in the Philippines as long as they are properly registered and regulated.  However, they should only be activated if given permission by the radio spectrum operator which calibrates the devices to ensure that they are confined within a specific area and do not cause problems to other subscribers.

Last year, Globe reported to the NTC the increase in the number of interference cases due to the use of illegal signal repeaters in the National Capital Region (NCR).

NTC has already issued a warning to both Globe and Smart Communications Inc. of dominant carrier Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) that the government would impose sanctions if they fail the ongoing benchmarking tests for the first quarter.