Andreas Christodoulou, on a network read from a Nicosia rooftop.
Telecommunications engineer, Nicosia, thirty-one years on the Cyprus mobile beat.
My beat
I am a telecommunications engineer by training and a technical writer by inclination. The first nineteen years of my working life were spent in radio planning — first for the original Cyprus GSM rollout of 1995, then for the 3G overlay of 2004, then for the 4G transition of 2013. The last twelve years I have spent writing about mobile networks for the technical press: a column in Telecom Cyprus Weekly, occasional pieces in the Greek-language Diktya kai Tilepikoinonies, and the slow, year-on-year reporting that this journal collects.
Where I work from
I work from a small office above the bakery on Solomos Square in central Nicosia, three streets back from the cathedral. The office has a view of the rooftop of the former Cyprus Telecommunications building, where the first Cyprus GSM cell was installed in 1995, and where I worked as an assistant radio planner in the months before and after that switch-on. The journal is written, in part, with that rooftop in view.
Why this journal
The technical literature on Cyprus mobile networks is, for an island that has been continuously cellular since 1995, surprisingly thin. The Department of Electronic Communications publishes its quarterly bulletins; the three operators publish their annual reports; the European Commission's Digital Economy and Society Index publishes its periodic readings. None of these reads the island as a single technical system. The journal is an attempt at that reading.
Sources
The journal draws on four principal sources: the published filings of the Department of Electronic Communications (1994–present); the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's specification documents (for the technical baselines); the radio-planning notebooks I have kept since 1995 (with the operators' permission to use them at a description-only level, with no specific cell identifiers); and the conversations on the rooftops with the radio-planning teams of the current operators. None of those conversations are attributed.
What this is not
It is not a buyer's guide. It does not compare tariffs, does not recommend an operator, does not maintain commercial relationships with any of them, and does not, in any of its pages, suggest that the reader should switch, sign, or purchase anything. The journal is interested in the network as a technical artefact, not as a commercial product.
On the small scale
Cyprus is a small mobile country. The population of the area under the Republic's administration is approximately nine hundred and fifteen thousand; the active mobile-subscription count is approximately one and a half million (the surplus is dominated by tourism SIM use and by secondary lines); the area is roughly fifty-six hundred square kilometres of land. By European standards, this is a network on a manageable scale — a scale at which a single editor can, in a working week, walk every major coverage zone. That is the working scale this journal assumes.
The journal is interested in the network as a technical artefact, not as a commercial product. It reads the antenna, the cable, the back-haul ring, the spectrum filing. It does not read the tariff.
— A. C., Nicosia