East African Business Week

KAMPALA, UGANDA - As the December 31, 2012 deadline for East Africa's switch from analogue to digital broadcasting draws near, there are concerns that many Ugandans do not really understand the new concept.
Despite the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) holding regular public dialogues in several parts of the country, many Ugandans are not aware of what this switch actually means.
Mr Joseph Okolong, a local businessman in the suburb of Kireka near Kampala told East African Business Week that he had no idea what people meant when they talked about digital migration.
 "What is that digital migration they talk about? Those guys just want to get rich from us because we shall be buying the boxes (decoders) from them."
Okolong just like many Ugandans, is oblivious of the advantages that come with the shift from analogue to digital broadcasting.
One thing that comes up is that the sensitization campaigns have not really touched everyone the way they were supposed to.
Not only that, there are major concerns as to whether Uganda would meet the East African deadline as a result of the government halting the process pending investigations into the awarding of the tender to Huawei.
Uganda had offered Chinese firm Huawei technologies the right to spearhead digital migration after securing a loan from the EXIM Bank.
Government has however assured the nation that it would meet the regional deadline of December 2012.
The Information and Communication Technology state minister, Mr. Nyombi Tembo recently assured the nation that despite the challenges, Uganda would beat the regional migration deadline.
"We would like to assure broadcasters that the Government is not thinking of asking for a deadline extension. We are sure we will beat the deadline," Tembo.
Although satellite broadcasting systems exist all over the world, the terrestrial broadcasting networks continue to be the primary de
livery systems for television and radio broadcasting services. The analogue broadcasting systems require significant radio frequency spectrum which  is a  finite resource. Digital broadcasting systems, besides other attributes, are meant to address the issue of radio spectrum as a scarce resource.
 Uganda has over 15 free to air television stations and 270 free to air radio stations. It also has a satellite television broadcaster. This clearly shows how liberated the broadcasting sector is, in the country.
According to the regional conference, the entire world should have migrated to digital from analogue TV broadcasting by June 2015. Uganda, and the East African Community partner states, however, set an ambitious target of December 2012 as the year the countries would have completed the switch, three years ahead of the global target.
Uganda's opposition leaders raised concerns over the pricing with one of the leaders pointing out that as opposed to the $74.6 million, the country can get the same service for as low as $40 million.
However, a closer scrutiny of the feasibility study for Uganda carried out on the Digital Migration project by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC) found out that the project was technically and economically viable from the cost of US$74.6 million.
The study states that Uganda uses the DVB-T2 (the latest DTV technology) which technically translates into a total of 28 transmission station sites hosting 62 digital transmitters to effectively cover the whole country with a signal foot print making it an economical and infrastructural reality to set up digital television broadcasting anywhere in the country. This capacity effectively provides for 120 TV programme channels and 4 studios with complete unit extras.
A closer look at the region shows that Kenya on the other hand has a budget of US$80 million for their digital migration project. Though Kenya is bigger than Uganda in size, the country on average has a flatter terrain than Uganda making TV signal transmission easier because it reduces the need to setup microwave transmission sites, this is why the two countries have almost similar budgets.
Rwanda on the other hand uses the less modern DVB-T technology (which will have to be upgraded at a cost) with a total of 14 transmission sites and 14 digital transmitters, 8 TV programme channels, and only 1 studio at a project cost of US$40 million.  
Therefore, Uganda benefits more in terms of the infrastructure like the Monitoring centre, Set Top Boxes, Network operation centre (NOC) and a data centre which Rwanda for instance doesn't have.     
What remains to be seen is whether the country would really beat the deadline.