The Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) will hold a final round of consultations later this year on digital television regulations.
Towards the end of last year, the regulator repealed its previous digital migration regulations, placing draft digital terrestrial television regulations on the table for public comment.
During public consultations last month, broadcasters asked ICASA to amend the draft regulations.
ICASA GM for markets and competition division, Pieter Grootes, says the authority will issue another draft in June, which will be followed by the “last” round of consultations as it wants to meet the deadline for turning off analogue television.
SA is set to turn on digital television using the European DVB-T2 standard in September, while analogue broadcast will end within two years of switch on. Internationally, analogue broadcast will stop being protected in the middle of 2015.
Grootes says ICASA's role is to assign channels and spectrum for the dual-illumination period and “beyond”. He says the authority may have to engage with the Department of Communications, before issuing the last draft regulations, but it will publish the legislation by the end of June.
ICASA needs to make sure it includes all the “issues” raised by stakeholders in the new draft regulations, says Grootes.
The authority previously explained it had to issue new regulations as the technological standard has changed since it published the previous set of regulations in February 2010. SA initially decided to migrate using DVB-T, before pondering the Brazilian ISDB-T standard and eventually settling on DVB-T2 at the beginning of last year.
The authority explained, in a Government Gazette, that the new standard is 50% more efficient and it was necessary to “assess the implications of this increase on the allocation of capacity”.
“This is clearly a complex multi-stakeholder, multi-activity project in which a breakdown in any one sphere of activity has a knock-on effect on the delivery of other activities,” said ICASA in a statement signed by chairman Stephen Mncube. It explained it had to change its regulations to meet any future contingencies.
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