The ITU (International Telecommunication Union ), working in partnership with the African Telecommunications Union, has announced that 47 countries have agreed on the mechanisms to deploy digital TV, which will also trigger a digital dividend, freeing up spectrum for mobile broadband in both the 800MHz and 700MHz bands.
The consolidation of national plans for analog-to-digital TV switchover will enable the continent to meet the ITU deadlines of June 2015, for UHF, and June 2020, for VHF in 33 countries.
According to the ITU, the frequency coordination agreement puts Africa in a position to allocate the digital dividend to mobile services for both the sub-1GHz bands ‘ valuable for broad coverage and cost effective rural deployments – from 2015.
Francois Rancy, director of the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau, announced that sub-Saharan African countries have begun submitting official modifications to the original GE06 Plan. He said: ‘The objective was to enable African countries to allocate the digital dividend to mobile services in the band 694MHz-862MHz, as a regionally harmonized implementation of the decisions taken at WRC-12 [the ITU’s World Radio Conference 2012]. This objective was reached by replanning the spectrum requirements of television broadcasting in the 470MHz-694MHz frequency band.’