In News:
- The aviation and telecom departments will shortly roll out a plan to ensure safe flight operations around airports with 5G airwave infrastructure.
- This is being done after India’s aviation regulator flagged concerns about interference that 5G signals could cause, potentially posing a challenge to safe airline operations.
What’s in today’s article:
News Summary
- The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is currently preparing an operational guideline to ensure safe flight operations around airports with 5G airwave infrastructure.
- The plan includes:
- telecom companies setting up infrastructure powering 5G networks in the country away from the flight path around airports,
- carrying low power signals in such areas and
- a plan to upgrade the altimeter of all aircraft operating in the country by August 2023.
Concerns around 5G interference with flight operations
- Concerns in India
- In September, the Indian Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) wrote to the telecom department flagging concerns over the likely interference of 5G C-Band spectrum with aircraft radio altimeters.
- A radio altimeter is an instrument that provides direct height-above-terrain information to various aircraft systems.
- These altimeters as well as a part of the 5G telecom services operate in the mid C-Band frequency range.
- 5G terrestrial signals typically operate at a very heavy power level compared to flight altimeters. This increases the possibility of interference.
- Earlier this year, the 6,000-pilot-strong Federation of Indian Pilots had also written to the Civil Aviation Ministry raising similar concerns.
- Similar concerns in US
- So far, US aviation authorities have reported about 85 cases of 5G waves impacting flight operations near the airport.
- In the US, an agreement between the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the telecom operators resulted in a delay in rollout of 5G services in the C-Band near airports that were assessed to be difficult for pilots to make visual approaches.
- Earlier this year, Air India had to cancel some of its flights to the US.
- This was done amid concerns that the rollout of 5G mobile services in the US could potentially interfere with aircraft navigation systems.
- Since then, the FAA has issued several directives to airlines to install certain filters or modify their equipment to ensure that 5G airwaves do not interfere with their navigation systems.
- Concerns raised by other industries
- With the guard band between the 5G telecom and broadcast services narrowing sharply, broadcasters have cited multiple incidents of disruptions.
- A guard band is a narrow frequency range that separates two ranges of wider frequency.
- This ensures that simultaneously used communication channels do not experience interference, which would result in decreased quality for both transmissions.
- They raised concerns over possible interference and potential outages once full-scale 5G services are launched across the country.
C-Band
- C-band refers to the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum allotted for satellite transmissions in the 4GHz to 8GHz frequency range.
- The C band is used for many satellite communications transmissions, some Wi-Fi devices, some cordless telephones, as well as some Radar and weather radar systems.
- For telecom service providers, the C-Band presents a sweet spot for rolling out 5G services, ensuring coverage as well as high bandwidth, resulting in faster internet speeds.
- For aircraft operations, the use of altimeters in this band ensures highly precise measurements of the plane’s altitude.
