The International Telecommunication Union has just published its 2022 status report, which reveals that only 15 of the 54 countries on the African continent have completed their migration to digital terrestrial television: Algeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Eswatini, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia.
According to this report, several large countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal, Cameroon, and the DRC are still in the process of migration.
When asked why it is so important to migrate to DTT, the answer is: to allow telecom operators to benefit from the frequencies freed up by the switch from analog to digital broadcasting. Other reasons cited include improved image quality and, above all, an increase in the number of channels available to viewers.
In most countries, this technological revolution was therefore implemented under pressure from telecom operators and "new entrants," i.e., those who wanted to launch free-to-air television but were unable to do so due to a lack of available frequencies.
Existing channels were naturally opposed to this development, as modernizing their infrastructure would be costly and, above all, the arrival of new channels would upset the balance and cause them to lose market share to the "new entrants."
It was therefore under joint pressure from telecom operators and the legislator itself, which wanted to generate significant revenue from the sale of frequencies to telecom operators and open up the advertising market to competition, that DTT was able to develop in Europe and elsewhere.
In Europe, the UHF frequencies above 700 MHz freed up by analog television were allocated to telecom operators and sold at a high price by governments: these are known as the golden frequencies. They have the particular feature of allowing mobile networks to penetrate buildings more effectively—these waves pass through concrete—and are very useful in sparsely populated areas, as they provide good coverage with a limited number of antennas.
The auctioning of these frequencies to telecom operators brought in €3.6 billion for the French government, for example, and led to a drastic reduction in subscription costs for the population thanks to the competition generated by the arrival of a fourth operator.
However, all these benefits, which could have been compelling arguments 15 or 20 years ago in most countries around the world, do not carry the same weight in Africa today.
Satellite broadcasting and pirate broadcasting (via cable) have for many years provided African viewers with access to a multitude of international-quality channels with image quality superior to that of analog TV. A "new entrant" could launch tomorrow in a country where DTT does not exist, relying on existing broadcasting platforms, and in any case, there is no real demand for more channels.
Furthermore, telecom operators show little interest in using the "golden frequencies" that they could use but which would require investments that they are not prepared to make.
So, instead of seeking to exploit the frequencies freed up by DTT (above 700 MHz), telecom operators are lobbying to use the frequencies allocated to television (below 700 MHz) themselves, which the UAR rightly refuses because sharing these frequencies could limit the development of television in certain regions.
In this context, the main benefits of DTT disappear: the frequencies freed up are not used by anyone and the arrival of new channels remains limited for financial reasons linked to the weakness of the TV advertising market and the existence of an already very wide and well-established audiovisual offering.
To comply with their international commitments, African states have invested millions of dollars in developing a technology which, given the high penetration of other means of broadcasting, has no future unless telecom operators take it up or are forced to take it up.
This would provide broader and less expensive access to digital technology for the African population. But the window of opportunity to resolve this issue is limited in time. Several years ago, digital giants such as Google and Meta, along with other major players including some telecom operators, launched massive cabling programs around Africa (2 Africa and Equiano) that will soon render the use of DTT frequencies obsolete.