The Ministry of Communications has assured Ghana will meet the global deadline to migrate from analogue television broadcasting to Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT).
This comes after a commercial court hearing an interlocutory injunction case filed by Star Communication Network Technology Company Limited of China yesterday, March 9, 2015 struck out the case.
According the Communications Ministry broadcasters should not be alarmed because migration to the DTT by the June 17, 2015 will be met.
The global deadline of June 17, 2015 to migrate television frequencies from analogue to DTT broadcasting was set by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva in 2006.
Speaking to Citi Business News, the Deputy Minister of Communications Ato Sarpong said government and all its stakeholders were instituting all requisite measures to accelerate the national migration process which should be complete by December 31, 2015.
“The deadline is 17th of June, what we’ve said that the national infrastructural will not be on stream by 17th of June but that does not mean that broadcasters migrating from analogue to digital platform will not be done by the global deadline, there are two things what we’ve said, we have some infrastructure on the ground already and we want to see how best we can leverage what is already on the grounds with our plan of a national roll out leverage the two, merge and consolidate the two which will ensure that we move unto a digital platform effective the 17th of June. So that is our plan in place.”
The Deputy Communications Minister told Citi Business News that ‘Greater Accra and the Ashanti Regions were going to be ready and will go live on the digital platform on the global deadline of 17th of June this year’.
‘While there are plans to follow with Volta, Upper East and Western regions by the end of the third quarter of the year while the remaining five regions being Northern, Central, Western, Eastern and Brong Ahafo Regions will be migrated onto the platform by December 31, 2015.
Meanwhile Ghana did not meet the regional deadline to migrate to the DTT by December 2014 which was agreed by West African sub-region member states at a meeting in Abuja, Nigeria in July 2013 which came after the Geneva 2006 global agreement.
