Introduction

The international telecommunications union
(ITU) set I7 june 2015 as the deadline to
switch off analogue TV broadcasting in the
UHF band. This was set by ITU member
states at the Regional Radio Communications
Conference in 2006 known as the GE06
regional agreement. SADC countries gave
themselves deadline of june 2013 to migrate
to digital transmission to allow each member
state to sort out any challenges that might arise
from the digital migration process before the
june 2015 ITU deadline. The plan was to have
dual illumination ie simultaneous transmission
of both analogue and digital signals between
june 2013 and complete analogue switch off
(ASO) date of June 2015. Unfortunately SADC
countries spent a lot of time failing to reach
consensus on which terrestrial transmission
standard to adopt only to agree on DVB-T2

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standard in 2012 more than six years after the
GE06 agreement.
SADC still could not reach consensus since
Botswana went out of line with the rest of
the SADC member states and adopted the
Japanese standard, the integrated services
digital broadcasting - ISDB –T standard.
June 2015 came and passed and very few
countries in Africa had migrated to digital
terrestrial transmission (DTT). In SADC only
Mauritius, Namibia and Tanzania managed to
complete the DTT migration and ASO by june
2015. ITU extended the ASO deadline to June
2020 for developing countries. The following
is an analysis of progress of DTT migration of
Zimbabwe and SADC countries.

DIGITAL TERRESTRIAL TELEVISION MIGRATION IN ZIMBABWE - CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

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