Ghana To Switch-Over To Digital Terrestrial Television Next Year

Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the Minister of Communications, has said the National Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) Project switch-over would commence in the first quarter of next year.

She said the Ministry had completed the provision of dedicated power to 37 DTT transmission sites in eight regions, namely Eastern, Central, Western, Volta, Northern, Brong Ahafo, Upper East and Upper West.

She said a team of NEDCO engineers and the suppliers, NET Limited, were currently provisioning the dedicated electricity power into the transmitters to ensure the availability of digital broadcasting signals in the northern part of the country.

Mrs Owusu-Ekuful, announced this at the Meet-the-Press series in Accra when the Communications Ministry took its turn.

“All other sites have dedicated power and testing is ongoing and the switchover is scheduled to commence in the first quarter of next year,” she said

Government is implementing the road map to migrate the country from analogue to digital television transmission.

The ‘As-Built’ DTT platform has two multiplexes with a full capacity of 40 Standard Definition (SD) channels.
This capacity has been fully exhausted by existing analogue broadcasters, and that, new broadcasters had been authorised by the National Communications Authority (NCA) to operate.

According to the Minister, there were pending applications for digital terrestrial television broadcasting authorisations in existing regions and the new regions to be created, which would also require localized channels on the platform.

She said adequate capacity has to be provided to accommodate broadcasters that had secured premium content rights (i.e. pay-per-view events) and wanted to transmit through the platform.

Additionally, international broadcast companies such as France24, CNN, and others had also expressed interest in localizing their content on the DTT platform when capacity is available, she said.

In recognition of those challenges, the Minister stated that, an audit of the DTT infrastructure was conducted and expansion of the infrastructure to include disaster recovery sites and additional 60 channels with a mix of High Definition and Standard Definition Channels was recommended.