what is the effect of Ducting effect on RF network?

It has an adverse impact, and occurs due to the formation of different temperature layers of air in the atmosphere. During early morning, and early evening, when the atmospheric temperatures are changing, the cooler air (being denser) stays close to ground and the warmer air (being less dense) stays higher. Now when the Radio Waves tend to enter the cooler air zone, they get reflected (according to 'Total Internal Reflection', just like in optical fibers). This causes the radio waves to over-shoot and go to longer distance (you may notice that in rural areas, there is weak signal in day time, and better in the evening). As the distance/Timing Advance increases, there is weak DL/UL signal strength therefore bad quality, hence the drop calls increase. This phenomenon is even more pronounced when summers and winters are interchanging, and even more near rivers.

Hamid Umair Saeed @ Syed Aqil Imam, can you please tell us either ducting effect is frequency dependent or not? What i mean to say it would be having more effect on 900 or 1800 or 2100 MHz? I believe 900 band would be more affected but have you some documentary evidence of it? Thanks

Syed Aqil Imam, PMP @ Hamid Umair Saeed. I don't have such a document or observation, it will be interesting to find that out though. However, I also believe that 900 would be worse affected because 1800 has a better penetration ability in general.

Anthony Dunne Hi Sarwartha, the big issue here, to me, is that with the over-shoot, as mentioned by Syed Aqil, comes problems with your frequency reuse. If you have not been careful to plan for this you could experience co-channel interference where you thought that your frequency reuse plan should have protected you. You may even think you have an illegal user on your channel when it is your own system catching you unawares. If the ducting is particularly bad you could even be suffering adjacent channel interference. Both situations could be manifested in desensitisation of your receiver and so reduced coverage would occur. If your C/I is exceeded then you could run errors if it is a digital system

Syed Aqil Imam, PMP I agree with Anthony. However, in my experience, sometimes it becomes very difficult to avoid the frequency clashes because generally the spectrum/codes is limited and in Rural clutter you tend to have less cell sites/NodeBs with high antennas, and higher loading to save CAPEX and OPEX. So in my opinion, there's nothing much that can be done about it. We couldn't help this issue much in our network ever since we learned this phenomena.