Darren Baguley19 June 2008, 11:00 AM
Why is the government waiting five years and spending millions encouraging the takeup of digital TV? Why not just buy every household in Australia a $50 digital set top box?
When Steven Conroy took over from Helen Coonan as Federal Communications Minister, one of the first meaningful things he did was push back the switch off date for the analogue television network to December 13, 2013.Yes, that’s right depending on what part of Australia you live in that’s one to two years PAST the somewhat woolly schedule of his predecessor. So much for the hopes that some of us had that the new government under the 50-something Kevin Rudd might be a bit more forward looking and technology friendly.
There are a few good reasons to make the shift to digital television; the picture and sound is so much better and problems such as ‘ghosting’ (where the image on the screen is doubled up) just disappear, not to mention the extra channels. But most televisions sold in Australia still need a set top box (STB) to access digital broadcasts and even though STBs are reasonably priced and readily available for less than $60 in supermarkets, most people don’t bother. According to a report released by ACMA in February 2008 59.9 percent of Australian televisions are still analogue.
When you consider that Australia was one of the first countries in the world to go down the digital road when it started digital broadcasts in 2001, and there are nations that started the process after us but have or will have finished before we do, I reckon to time to pull the plug is a lot sooner than 2013. Why, you ask? Well, the main reason is that radio spectrum is not a limitless resource; it’s a very finite resource that analogue television hogs a lot of and has quite a large price tag attached to it.
In March 2001 auctioning off the 3G mobile phone spectrum netted the Howard Government $1.17 billion, a relatively paltry amount at the time because the tech industry was reeling from the dot bomb crisis. Seven years down the track, the United States government auctioned off the broadcasters’ spectrum licences in anticipation of the analogue network shut down early next year and raised US$19 billion to help pay for the war in Iraq (admittedly, that probably ended up only paying for a few armor-plated screwdrivers, but still...)
While the Australian government is unlikely to net anywhere near as much money as the US, Wayne Swan would still trouser billions rather than hundreds of millions from the sale of the analogue spectrum. At a rough guestimate there are 15 to 20 million*** televisions in Australia, 40 percent which are already digital. (The stats for this are actually really hard to find. I’ve worked this number out on the basis that the ABS says there are 8.1 million households in Australia. An ACMA report suggests that most family homes with children have around three televisions, however, this type of household represents approximately half of all households, the remainder being single person households, couples without children, couples whose children have left home etc.)
Basic standard definition STBs cost around $50 and high definition STBs cost around $100 so I think it’s time the Australian government did something similar to the US government and subsidise the cost of an STB, or simply buy them and deliver them to every household. It might cost several hundred million, but then the government stands to make billions out of selling the spectrum so it will end up ahead.
Who would buy said spectrum you ask? The main contender is wireless broadband, and in particular WiMax. I know what you’re thinking; WiMax is a dog technology that will never work and it’s a complete waste of money. Perhaps so, but Intel is shovelling millions of dollars into WiMax and shutting down analogue TV will free up the 700MHz spectrum which happens to have a few advantages when it comes to the technology, says Gartner analyst Robin Simpson.
“WiMax at 700Mhz starts to look a bit more interesting. The main business case, if there is a business case for WiMax, is for rural and regional areas that are too difficult or expensive to reach with fixed line infrastructure. When you’re in a rural or regional area what you want is range not capacity (the combination of bandwidth and the number of people you can serve). At 700MHz, because of the way the physics work, you get great range but you don’t get much capacity. So while 700MHz in the City doesn’t necessarily make sense, it makes a hell of a lot of sense in rural and regional areas.”
One of the Rudd Government’s election promises was to make broadband available to 98 percent of Australians no matter where they live. There are a lot of places in rural and regional Australia where it’s prohibitively expensive to lay fibre so you would think they’d be as keen as mustard to shut down the analogue network, drag the country into the age of digital broadcasting and free up the 700MHz spectrum while they’re at it.