Guatemala gets back on track with DTT
Details
Juan Fernandez Gonzalez
| 09 March 2017

After years without progressing its DTT plan, Guatemala is ready to get back on track towards a switch-off that will happen in 2022 at the earliest.

The country’s telecom authority, Superintendencia de Telecomunicaciones (SIT), has drafted a document with regulatory guidelines for DTT implementation, which now has to be sanctioned by the Government.

The document aims to harmonise the new frequencies and spectrum bands which are already being used, in particular those for new mobile technologies, which will be awarded this year.

The move is the first step forward since Guatemala established an initial roadmap in 2012, deciding it would use the ISDB-T broadcasting standard, as most of Latin America has done. But the country is still at the very beginning of its DTT switchover.

“We are talking five years at best,” said José Raúl Solares Chíu, head of SIT, referring to how soon Guatemala will be able to switch off analogue TV. According to Solares, speaking during the Seminario de Seguimiento para la Implementación de la Televisión Digital Terrestre en Guatemala, the process won’t be complete before 2022, and that is if there are no delays.

No Central American country has completed the digital TV switchover so far, but most territories are ahead of Guatemala in terms of implementation. In fact, Costa Rica plans to complete its switch off by December 2017, becoming the second LATAM country to do so.