Nigerian towns sharing boundaries with some countries may experience frequency interferences from June following inability of Nigeria to meet next month’s deadline for all analogue broadcast to migrate to digital, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek has learnt.
Nigeria shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in the north. Its coast lies on the Gulf of Guinea in the south and it borders Lake Chad to the northeast.
International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has ruled out any deadline extension for countries that will fail to meet the June 17, 2015 to migrate to digital broadcast.
By implication, ITU will stop protecting analogue broadcasting from any interference in countries that have not migrated to digital on June 17.
Worse, the setback will result in the delayed adoption of wireless broadband technology.
In Nigeria, Emeka Mba, director general, National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), admitted that the June deadline to switch over from analogue to digital terrestrial broadcasting is not feasible in the country.
He added that Nigeria will be able to switch over from analogue to digital in the next 18 months.
‘With the pace the commission is going, by December 2016, we should be where we want to be,” he said.
Austin Nwaulune, director, Spectrum Administration, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), stated that in the event that the country fails to migrate from analogue to digital broadcasting by June 17, this year, analogue transmission will not be protected from interference by International Telecommunications Union (ITU) as the protection would have been removed.
Engr. Gbenga Adebayo, chairman, Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) and chief executive officer, CNSSL, explained that “Only communities in Nigeria sharing border with countries that have migrated to digital broadcasting will be experiencing interference.
The inference is possible if such frequency has been allocated to other uses outside of broadcasting,” he noted.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that ITU had earlier set June 2013 as deadline for migration but extended it by two years to allow countries that were not ready to prepare themselves.
For countries that have migrated and those still in the process of migrating, the technological change in television viewing is warranting proper explanations to the consumers, who are directly affected by the change. Hence, experts and broadcast regulators globally have continued to raise awareness level such that every consumer is able to know what to do in the new regime.
To pick a digital broadcast signal, one needs to have a digital TV. Digital TV is any TV that has a digital tuner.
However, if one still has an analogue TV, one needs to get a digital receiver in form of a set-top box (also referred to as a decoder). A set-top box is a device which converts the signals from a digital television broadcast into a form which can be viewed on the traditional television set.