COMMUNICATIONS Minister Faith Muthambi has said South African television viewers would not face broadcasting disruptions when International Telecommunications Union (ITU) ceases to protect analogue users from signal interference from Monday.
Muthambi said in a statement on Sunday that South Africa and other countries had an agreement with the ITU to facilitate the migration of broadcasting services from the analogue format to the digital terrestrial television platform.
In 2006 the ITU resolved at a regional radio communications conference that all countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East should migrate from analogue to digital broadcasting services by 2015. It set a deadline of June 17.
“As we have indicated before, our country is not in a position to migrate to the digital platform by this date,” Muthambi said.
However, she had conducted a risk mitigation analysis with the department’s digital migration programme management office, and this had established that the most immediate television signal interference threat would come from outside the borders of the country.
A number of measures had been taken to reduce this risk, and she had signed agreements of co-operation with Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique. She was finalising agreements with Namibia and Zimbabwe.
The purpose was to harmonise the use of the radio frequency spectrum while the countries underwent digital migration to ensure that there was not interference.
“All these countries are assured that June 17 will come and go without any major negative impact on their analogue television services.”
The digital migration project was still a priority and the project management office was working to ensure that set-top boxes were manufactured and delivered to complete the migration process.
In March the government approved amendments to the digital migration policy which were criticised by the SA Communications Forum, an industry body representing electronic manufacturers, who said the department had altered some agreements reached during earlier consultations. These related to encryption and the rollout of the television set-top boxes.
In analogue, one channel, such as SABC 1, uses a dedicated frequency to broadcast because of the large amount of bandwidth the analogue signal requires.
In digital the signal is compressed, allowing more channels to be broadcast in the same bandwidth that one analogue channel would use. Moving to digital therefore releases bandwidth which can be used for other services and will offer more television channels.
The project to move to digital would cost more than R3 billion.
The government has said it would provide decoders to five million poor households which would be identified by a national means test.
Cape Times