By Prince Osuagwu

Despite switching two states, Kaduna and Kwara to the digital terrestrial broadcasting platform last week, Nigeria’s journey to Digital broadcasting has been anything but smooth.

Not after the country thrice failed to meet the ITU deadlines for countries to migrate fully to digital broadcasting

Worse still, a recent Committee report on how Nigeria has fared in the digitization process, tore the country’s several attempts into shreds branding the whole process, a sham.

Christoph Limmer, Eutelsat

The Ad-Hoc Committee which was constituted on  June, 22 2016, to investigate the process of digital broadcast switch over in Nigeria, followed the adoption of House Resolution (HR.24/2016) on a motion titled “urgent need to investigate the process of digital (Broadcast) switch over in Nigeria now slated for June 2017”

The Committee, in the course of investigation observed that the DSO process was not implemented in line with Federal Government White Paper report on digital transition in Nigeria and that the Process was not driven by any legal or legislative framework as recommended by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The report believed that its finding were responsible for the triple deadline misses the country has suffered while even other African countries that are not as big and economically viable as Nigeria, switched over on or before deadline.

After Nigeria alongside other 119 member countries in 2006 signed up to the International Telecoms Union, ITU protocol to transit from Analogue to Digital broadcasting by 2015 in line with the current global trend, the country gave itself a task of concluding transition by June 17 2012, three years before deadline. In a bid to achieve the 2012 migration date, the federal government in 2007, approved the process and in 2008, it inaugurated a Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC) on transition from analogue to digital broadcasting.

Digital migration The committee submitted a report with several recommendations on how the country will achieve its aim. However, for what many stakeholders described as lack of political will, the government, kept silent on the report and failed to release a white paper on it for three years.

As a result of that, Nigeria failed to comply with the June 17, 2012, digital migration deadline it set for itself. Having missed migration in 2012, government resorted to the main ITU deadline of June 17, 2015 and quickly inaugurated a 14-man team tagged Digiteam Nigeria. Again, scepticism  from the two important stakeholders in the process – the National Broadcasting Commission, NBC and the Broadcasters, few months after the inauguration, began to send signals that the process may still derail.

While NBC reminded that a whole lot of funds, which it didn’t have at the time, were needed to achieve DSO, broadcasters doubted government’s sincerity about the whole project, since many states and federal government establishments were still   ordering for analogue equipment, few months to the migration date. The result at the end of the day was that Nigeria joined 51 other African countries at that time, which failed to meet the June 17, 2015 deadline.

The implication of that particular goof was that analogue signals from Nigerian broadcasting stations would receive no protection in the event of interference with or from digital signals from neighbouring countries.

Modibbo Kawu, DG NBC

Because there were reports that if the analogue transmitters should interfere with any digital broadcast in the neighbouring countries, ITU can force the country to shut down its own analogue transmitters, Nigeria appealed to the organisation for an extension to June 2017 and immediately began a state by state gradual transmission from analogue to digital broadcasting.

It began with Jos, Plateau State, and Abuja, the federal capital territory but could not bring other states to the platform before the June 20, 2017 deadline elapsed again.

Since June 2017 deadline failure, the only good news from National Broadcasting Commission, NBC, drivers of the process is the switching of Kwara and Kaduna states.

Meanwhile experts have serious doubts that this pace would take the country far in any distant future.

However, in a recent chat with Hi-Tech, Eutelsat’s Vice President, Global Sales and Commercial Development for Video Business Mr Christoph Limmer, said that Nigeria could turn to satellite for faster, total switching.

He said that a combination of satellite, mobile and terrestrial infrastructure, will help not only Nigeria, but other African countries achieve faster DSO at significantly reduced cost.

He said: “The main challenge to deploying nationwide Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) is to manage timely and equitable switchover for everyone in order not to create a digital divide that separates the homes with digital from the homes left only with analogue. The challenge is particularly steep for countries with a large landmass, mountain ranges or islands that typically remain beyond range of terrestrial networks, or with interference issues in border regions.

“Most terrestrial operators deploy fibre networks and DTT towers on the basis of return on investment, meaning they concentrate on areas with a certain population density and they neglect users in more rural or semi-rural areas. The risk in doing this is that too many consumers beyond range of the benefits of digital, would be left out.

“I think at the end of the day, African countries have to think, not just in the terrestrial infrastructure but about a combination of infrastructures. If you want to migrate analogue to digital, use satellite and by doing that, they can do that from one day to the next. Just put the channels on satellite, you switch-off the terrestrial network and you have digital migration in 24 hours.

What I want to illustrate is that, if you combine infrastructures- terrestrial and satellite, you can be faster in achieving the objectives of digital migration which means changing the analogue to digital.

It can be very cost effective because they combine different infrastructures and they use different infrastructures with audience, languages and most importantly, reach everyone in the country which is also one of the objectives”.

He argued that most governments that have embarked on Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) have quickly understood that, as content and signal quality progress and the number of towers grow, the efficiency of satellites for content distribution comes into play.

He also contended that environmental conditions or the risk of outages and fibre cuts can even make the reliability of terrestrial infrastructure an issue.