East African Business Week

KAMPALA, UGANDA- Delayed funding by the government towards the switch from analogue technology transmission to digital technology transmission, referred to as the digital migration process, has greatly hampered Uganda's progress, a senior Uganda Communications Commission official told East African Business Week in Kampala.
Mr. Godfrey Mutabazi, the UCC executive director noted that he was not sure whether Uganda would beat the December 31, 2012  deadline given the lengthy delays in the process.
Digital migration is a process during which services that operate on analogue network are transferred across to digitally-based network over a specific period of time.
 The migration aims to ensure that all services operating on the analogue network will be fully replicated on the digital network with the aim of switching off the analogue services at a specific time.
"If the question is the total cost of the project, we can start and account for every money than this kind of delay," said Mutabazi during the COMESA digital migration workshop in Kampala.
The digital migration process in Uganda was halted in August this year  after the Ministry of Finance cited inflated figures for the total cost of the project.
The Inspectorate of Government was asked to institute an inquiry into the proposed $77.2m (Ush193b) for the whole process to find out the level of inflation. The results of the IGG investigations are yet to be released. The other hiccup, in the process, is that the implementers, Huawei technologies, were picked without competitive bidding as required by the Public Procurement and Disposal of Assets Act the right to spearhead the migration.
The broadcasters are also still opposed to the sole distributor of the signal, as it emerged that a "competitor" Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC) was fronted to host and distribute signals on behalf of all television and radio stations.
Mutabazi indicated that with the single signal distributor UBC was yet to start on replacing the old analogue equipment and transmitters due to the government's delay to fund the process.
"And it will be upon to us to fight interference because we cannot sue our neighbours for any interference they will cause to our country as a result of our delay," he added.
In 2006, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) developed a Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting Plan, resulting from the Regional Radio Communications Conference of 2006 (RCC-06)  that was held in Geneva, Switzerland.
The agreement developed the Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting Plan in the frequency bands III (174-230 MHz) and IV/V (470-862 MHz) for countries in Region 1 (Europe, Africa and the Middle East and Region 3 (Islamic Republic of Iran).
According to the Geneva 2006 (GE06) Agreement that resulted from the RRC-06, all countries party to the agreement are required to migrate from analogue to digital broadcasting by June 2015. Being a signatory, Uganda set up a national task force to provide a clear guide on the migration process.
However, East African Community partner states had set an ambitious target of December 2012.