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SA to miss digital deadline

Nicola Mawson
By Nicola Mawson, Contributor.
Johannesburg, 04 Feb 2013
Africa, as a sub-region of the ITU, is behind on digital migration and may need an extension to the mid-2015 deadline.
Africa, as a sub-region of the ITU, is behind on digital migration and may need an extension to the mid-2015 deadline.

SA is not going to meet the international deadline for moving off analogue television onto a digital standard.

This will delay flow-through benefits such as additional spectrum in a range that is suitable for deploying broadband in rural areas.

In addition, the country has gone from being a leader on the continent to being behind several other countries that have already migrated. This delay is chipping away at SA's potential to be a manufacturing hub to make set-top boxes needed to decode digital signal for viewing on analogue televisions.

As a result of the further delay in getting migration off the ground, more money will have to be spent on dual illumination, in addition to what the country has already forked out since movement started along the migration road in 2006.

SA finally turned on digital TV as a pilot last October in the Karoo, after several delays, including a controversial decision by former communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda to look at using the Brazilian ISDB-T standard in 2010.

After the country finally decided to use DVB-T2 - the following year - it was set to finally turn off digital TV towards the end of this year, but has yet to launch DVB-T2 commercially. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will stop protecting analogue broadcast in the middle of 2015.

Not practical

The department has been meeting with broadcasters in a bid to find a solution to the latest impasse, which is over who handles conditional access. Free-to-air broadcaster etv took the Department of Communications (DOC) to court last year and won its bid to overturn minister Dina Pule's May decision that Sentech would handle set-top box controls.

However, this created a dilemma for the department, as it had never envisaged the broadcasters handling controls, meant to stop grey imports and stolen boxes being used outside of SA. As a result, the DOC decided to appeal but has been talking to broadcasters in a bid to find middle ground.

The DOC's deputy DG of ICT policy development, Themba Phiri, says he is hopeful of finding a solution soon. "It will move forward, we will find a solution.'

However, even with a rapid solution this month, the tender to make decoders, which should have been awarded last October, can only be granted next month, with switch-on set for mid-year, says Phiri. The tender - to make between five million and seven million subsidised decoders - could not go ahead until the conditional access issue was sorted out.

Phiri says: "It simply follows that if we launch in mid-2013, we do not have enough time to migrate because it only gives us two years and our projection is that we need over three years to migrate."

Africa, as a sub-region of the ITU, is delayed, and there might be a need to approach the ITU for further extension, Phiri adds. In August, he said that SA's current commitment, as a member of the ITU, was to complete its digital migration by 17 June 2015.

Lagging

Countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have elected to use DVB-T2, while several others, to the north, have chosen to use DVB-T. However, while most African states have agreed to migrate and adopted a standard, only a handful have already migrated.

According to information on the Digital Video Broadcasting Web site, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius and Morocco have deployed DVB-T, while Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria and Zambia are rolling out T2

About 11.5 million households in SA will need decoders to keep watching television once the old-fashioned analogue broadcast is turned off, and former communications minister Roy Padayachie previously said 22 SADC countries are looking at SA to fill the need for as many as 30 million boxes.

Marian Shinn, Democratic Alliance shadow minister of communications, says South Africa is missing out on potential benefits of digital TV, including the potential manufacturing market, the digital dividend and will spend more in dual illumination.

Last year, based on SA meeting the ITU timeframe, Sentech said it needed an additional R213 million in 2014 and 2015 for dual illumination. It has been transmitting analogue and digital signals since November 2008 and will continue to do so until switch off and has, so far, covered around two-thirds of SA's population with T2 signal.

Shinn adds that because ITU protection ends in the middle of 2015, the picture quality will be suspect, because it will be subject to interference. She says it may be quicker to abandon the notion of having boxes made locally and import them for the time being.

SA had intended using migration as a catalyst for the flagging electronics sector. Pule has said migration is expected to facilitate the entry of about 1 000 small and medium companies into the electronics manufacturing sector. About 23 500 jobs in total should be created in the set-top box supply chain.

Shinn notes that the delay will also affect the awarding of spectrum in the digital dividend, which broadcasters have argued is needed to roll out rural broadband as it is more suited to wide open spaces.

Peter Lyons, director of spectrum policy for Africa and Middle East at the GSM Association, has said releasing spectrum in the digital dividend, the high-demand 2.6GHz band, and re-farming 1 800MHz by 2015 will add an additional 1.5 million jobs and R16 billion in gross domestic product.

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