After exhaustive consulting, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) will be making available for the public its collected database of radio licenses. Under the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) 2004, radio waves is now considered part of the category  “emissions” and therefore information such as transmitter details should be made available to the public by the beginning of next year. Ofcom is giving radio license owners until the 11th of November to inform them if they wish to be exempted from such a disclosure.

Some companies like British Telecommunications Plc (BT), and the Federation of Communication Services disagree on “radio waves” being under the category “emissions” since they do not have any notable environmental impact whatsoever. This idea is not exactly new as the Information Tribunal  debunked this idea in the case of the SiteFinder database (which was also managed by Ofcom) where it showed that “emissions” are environmental, and in the few cases that “emissions” are not environmental, the radio towers which were made of steel were. It seems that telecom companies arguing against this regulation are on the losing end. T-Mobile argued that unlike other countries, the UK is more prone to terrorism and that sharing information would only cause more peril by making radio towers more vulnerable. Ofcom disagrees and plans to start implementing this information disclosure by February the following year. Then everyone will have access to detailed information on fixed microwave links, satellite-earth stations, maritime radar, and more unless vendors request for exemptions.

Valid exemptions should fall in one of the three criteria: National Security, Defense, and Public Safety. For a vendor to seek exception, for instance, they would have to prove that if their radio tower were jammed or tampered with, it would gravely affect public safety. Unfortunately for them, this would have to be proven on a site-by-site basis. Or if they would like to argue for “public safety”, they would have to prove that disclosure leads to eventual fatalities. It is good to note though that those sites of vendors that fall in the Defense criteria get to have the most breathing space. Of course they have to prove it first.

What the public should be able to do when the information becomes available would be to look for transmitters in a specific area regardless of type and ownership. They would not be able to single out a particular transmitter type or a company. Ofcom does not plan to share the whole national dataset but are open to doing so once the legal issues with SiteFinder, another of its databases, have been cleared up.

While the issue with SiteFinder still has not found any closure, with vendors against the system intermittently hindering the collection of a complete national dataset the public can freely scrutinize, we will not be seeing all the information we would like as even Ofcom does not know information such as locations of specific transmitters. Even so, we are in for many interesting details so let us watch out for it.

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