Page 350 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2024

2024 ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference

ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early a) FIELD MONITORING TOOL: The Department will get
childhood development, care and pre-primary education’, a mobile app for real-time field monitoring (Figure 1) and
further incidence mentioned in point (b) mentioned above by assessing user experience, telecom coverage
affects the target 3.6 of SDGs – ‘halve the number of global effectiveness may be assessed to make necessary
deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents.’ Access to improvements [13].
mobile connectivity is linked to the majority of 17 SDGs
directly or indirectly. specifically, directly linked to SDG 1:
No Poverty, SDG-2: Ending Hunger SDG-3: Good Health
and Well-being SDG 4: Quality Education, SDG 5: Gender
Equality and SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth,
SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, SDG 10:
Reducing Inequalities.
Take an example related to coverage of mobile and SDG, in
India around half of the population depends on agriculture Figure 1 - A single telecom volunteer per village in India
and as per estimates 40% of farmers in India are still taking
loans from the informal banking sector and depend on
moneylenders [9]. Programs like M-Pesa (Mobile Money) b) PREDICTION MAPS: The dependency on TSP
provide an opportunity to get rid of the debt trap of coverage forecast maps will be reduced significantly as
moneylenders, which may provide impetus to farmers for an approach relying on automatic data collection from
quick money transfers. Kenyan mobile money system M- many user devices (volunteers) would likely provide
PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted better spectral maps (Figure 2) covering wide
194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of geographical areas than using data from a few accurate
poverty till 2020 [10]. In line with this, the Indian (but expensive) drive testing instruments [12].
government launched PM-KISAN as direct benefit transfers
to farmers. However, a deep dive into the digital arena
indicates farmers' challenges due to low cell connectivity or
service quality. Issues faced by farmers in Odisha are
explored in [11].
Quality mobile connectivity also facilitates education,
certification, skills training, financial services like transfers
and payments, and M2M agricultural services like crop, soil,
and weather monitoring. Thus, access to Quality
mobile/internet services on the one hand will improve the
livelihood of farmers on the other hand improve agricultural
productivity focusing on SDG 2 - end hunger, achieve food
security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable
agriculture. Figure 2 - Multiple telecom subscribers latched to the
same BTS for coverage maps.
1.3 Proposed Solutions and Benefits c) REDUCING EXPENDITURE: The dependence as of
The objective of this paper is to have a system owned by the now is on RF (radio frequency) coverage prediction maps
Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Government of provided by the TSPs collected through driving a
India which can tell the ground reality of the telecom services car/vehicle with a measuring kit along the main roads or
in any geographical area of interest. The system should be in other accessible regions where vehicles can be driven
trustable by the governments and the citizens, and it should [14]. Further, it is time-consuming, expensive, and not
be free from any conflict of interest (as per the current scalable [15], [16].
scenario, the Telecom coverage data is being collected from d) FUTURE FOUNDATION: The data collected will serve
telecom service providers (TSPs)). So, the objective will be as a foundation for all future forms of data analysis
fulfilled in the following ways: (Figure 3) in the telecommunications industry. The
i. A mobile application of DoT to be installed by users as designed application comprehensively captures all
volunteer citizens. conceivable sets of attributes related to the
ii. Real-time telecom parameters will be captured by the telecommunications industry.
application without any reliance on TSPs (Telecom
Service Providers).
iii. Historic mobile coverage data will show how the signal
is improving in an area and the technology of an area is
getting upgraded e.g.,3G to 4G to 5G.
iv. Operators will receive guidance regarding the necessary
infrastructure or configuration adjustments, such as
height, tilt, and power, to address the gaps in telecom
coverage based on the collected parameters [12].
The organization, Department of Telecommunications (DoT)
under the Ministry of Communications, Government of India Figure 3 - shows the best mobile operator.
will benefit in the following ways:

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