Sentech, the state-owned firm responsible for rolling out digital signal across South Africa, says 70 per cent of the country is now covered, which will rise to 80 per cent by the end of the month.
Tebogo Leshope, head of network engineering at Sentech, told the Digital TV Summit in Bryanston, Johannesburg the company was on track to meet its March 2014 deadline of rolling out digital signal to all provinces.
“That is our target,” he said. “We are very aggressive with that.
“We target a province and complete, and then move to the nest province.”
Gauteng was completed in March of last year, with the Free State following in December. Leshope said Limpopo should be complete by July and Mpumalanga by September. Northern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal will be the last provinces to be covered.
Leshope said Sentech will be unable to provide 100 per cent coverage by March 2014, however.
“It becomes more complicated as you move out of the main cities,” he said. “There will be gaps. Our infrastructure will enable a total of 88 per cent coverage.
“There will always be a gap. We would like to cover everyone. We are implementing a DTH connectivity to close that gap.”
He added that the company was putting in place redundancy capabilities, as under the new system the 20 free-to-air (FTA) channels will go through one system, compared to currently where there are four systems.
“We have to take into consideration that redundancy is required to minimise downtime,” he said. Sentech will use its 14 existing operation centres and provide a disaster recovery centre, as well as build automated redundancies into its networks.
“The system will be able to reconfigure itself,” he said. “We are also improving on our customer contact. We have started to decentralise to the regions.”
