In what came as a huge surprise to absolutely nobody who’s observed or been involved with South Africa’s bungled process of migration to digital terrestrial television (DTT) broadcasting, the deadline has now officially been missed. 17 June 2015, the date formally set by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and agreed to by the South African Department of Communications (DOC) way back in 2006, has come and gone.
Long touted as a major boon for, and keenly anticipated by, the local manufacturing sector, the process has repeatedly ground to a halt before obstacles put in its way by political and big-business interests. This has not been helped by an apparent lack of will within government to see broadcast digital migration (BDM) through, nor by cases of corruption within the DOC and frequent replacements of its minister. Although the metaphorical ball is now moving, its motion would be better described as ‘lurching’ than ‘rolling’.
During her first public acknowledgement, in April this year, that the 17 June deadline would unequivocally not be met, communications minister Faith Muthambi announced an 18-month plan for migration. This timeline promptly slipped backwards as in her next update on the matter, during her budget vote speech to parliament in May, she stated that “the rollout of set-top boxes will be completed in the next 18 to 24 months.”
The Democratic Alliance’s (DA) outspoken shadow minister of telecommunications and postal services, Marian Shinn, has now stirred the considerably muddied waters further by calling on Cabinet to reverse its controversial policy on encryption of DTT set-top boxes (STB). She stated the DA’s position in a strongly worded statement, of which an excerpt follows:
“South Africa’s retarded DTT process has been riddled with political interference and incompetence for a decade,” she stated. “The latest legal challenge to BDM focuses on the lack of encryption capability for the STBs to be locally produced to South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) specifications.
“It is widely believed in the electronics manufacturing and broadcasting sector that the policy, whose most recent controversial amendment was done without public participation, was written to favour pre-selected STB suppliers and the effective duopoly of SABC and MultiChoice. The current legal challenge by eTV, which believes lack of encryption capabilities jeopardises its financial sustainability, is delaying the assembly and sale of SABS-standard STBs to South Africans with analog TV sets.
“South Africa cannot be held up by a policy that contradicts itself, is clearly anti-competitive as well as being contrary to the policy of the governing party and its alliance partners. The DA calls on Cabinet to recognise its error in approving this policy and to reverse it so that our country can fast-track the DTT process and take advantage of the economic and service delivery potential that the freed-up analog broadcast spectrum offers for wireless broadband connectivity, and the expansion of broadcasting ownership, content and viewer choice.”
Meanwhile, the companies with the most to gain from the migration process, and the most to lose due to its continual delays, must sit on their hands as they wait for the tenders to be issued for the manufacture of the 5 million STBs that government has promised to provide for free to South Africa’s poorest. USAASA (the Universal Service and Access Agency of South Africa) has yet to announce issuance of the tenders to make these units, but Fin24 has reported that the tenders have been awarded, and submitted to the following 26 companies
Ellies
Temic
Trafalgar Electronics
NAMEC (National Association of Manufacturers in Electronic Components)
NAMEC Western Cape
NAMEC Microtronix
Seroma Mowa
QEC
Worldtel
Altech
Tellumat
Divtech
ABT Africa
Vektronix
CZ Electronics
Kopano Digital
African Digitech
Sifikile
LAMEC
Equiton
Meso Systems
Siyeza Suppliers
Leratadima
Maredi Telecoms
Baberiki
Phahama
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version