4G mobile tenders c’tee resumes work

Top Communications Ministry official: The inter-ministerial

team will continue its work, even though no letter of

appointment has been issued yet.

Acting Ministry of Communications director general Maimon Shmila will reconvene the 4G tenders committee, which has not met for months. In the past few weeks, Shmila has only been updated on the committee’s work, but he has now decided to reconvene it to continue its work from where it stopped.

Shmila added that he would also continue the work of the inter-ministerial team to find solutions for the building of cellular antennas.

Sources say that Shmila is trying to find a way for the allocation of 1,800 megahertz bandwidth frequencies in the 4G tender, while finding a solution requiring joint use of the frequencies by mobile carriers and joint use of the antennas in order to reduce the number of new antennas that will be needed. More antennas are necessary to reduce the radiation they produce. For this purpose, he needs to combine the work of the tenders committee and the inter-ministerial team on antennas, because without a solution on the antennas, it will be very difficult to set up 4G networks in Israel.

The tenders committee was chaired by Shmila’s predecessor, Eden Bar-Tal, and stopped working several months ago, following the change in ministers. Minister of Communications Gilad Erdan is aware of the 4G problem and the carriers’ need for more frequencies, but he is carrying the baggage from the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which supports the construction of many small antennas to reduce radiation.

The Ministry of Finance wants to publish tenders in the 1,800 megahertz bandwidth (three bands of 10 megahertz) as quickly as possible to the carriers that will pay the most. Later, a second set of tenders will be published for 2,500 megahertz bandwidth frequencies, after the IDF vacates them.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news – www.globes-online.com – on September 10, 2013