The government has announced plans to completely switch off analogue transmission by the end of this year, according to Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (Rura). Rwanda postponed the initial December 31, 2012 deadline to migrate from analogue to digital in TV broadcasting, set by the EAC partner countries due to unavailability of digital broadcasting converters. Digital broadcasting offers more channels with high quality signal reception. "Our plan is to switch off the last analogue transmitter by the end of this year. The challenge we have is getting enough decoders in time for the Rwandan market,” Jean Baptiste Mutabazi, the head of communication and media regulation at Rura, told The New Times yesterday. According to Rura, the scarcity of Set Top Boxes (STBs) that will enable viewers to access digital TV images was still hampering migration from analogue signals. "When the digital migration was launched in March 2013, we were expecting to get STBs by May 2013 and start switching off analogue transmitters by July 2013 starting with the one of Kigali (Jari and Rebero) and progressively switch off other transmitters in other areas; however the supply of STBs in the country is not as fast as previously expected,” he said. STBs drawbackMutabazi said the first batch of STBs brought into the country by Tele10 is already finished due to high demand of the devices. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) set 2015 as the global deadline for switching from analogue to digital broadcasting, that allows the introduction of additional services such as high definition television and pay TV on standard TV. The national broadcaster, Rwanda Broadcasting Corporation, better known as Orinfor, which is currently broadcasting in analogue and digital, plans to switch off analogue content by December 2013, according to Innocent Nkurunziza, the technical director. "We shall stop dual illumination by the end of this year,” he said, adding that they are already distributing STBS to several sectors as part of the awareness campaign to encourage consumers to buy the decoders.The big gapPresently, only StarTimes, a Chinese-owned pay TV, and DStv subscribers, access digital transmission. Orinfor digital broadcasting hosts many channels, including TV5, MTV, France 24 (English and French), TV10 and Rwanda Television. However, Mutabazi said some members of the business community had promised to import STBs before the country fully switches to digital transmission. "We believe that if those suppliers keep their promise as they said we can achieve migration by end of the year,” he said. Cedric Pierre-Louis, the managing director of Tele10/TV, said they imported only 1,000 digital TV converters thinking that, they will not get market but they were surprised by the demand. "We sold them out within a period of two weeks. We have imported another batch of 10,000 STBs and it is already on the way to Kigali,” he added. Pierre-Louis said Tele10 was facilitating the country’s move to shift from analogue to digital broadcasting.