Government is negotiating with the South African Broadcasting Authority to grant the country rights to broadcast 2010 World Cup. With the Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial (DVBT) and a mast at Karisimbi Summit, engineers in Rwanda believe they will be able to broadcast marches live from South Africa. BVDT was among the first projects in phase1 to be implemented on the biggest antenna in the Great Lakes Region at Karisimbi Mountain. And reports coming in indicate that South Africa also intends to install BVDT to ease broadcasting the 2010 matches. Already electricity has been connected to the Summit and Fiber optic connection is complete. With this in place, the Karisimbi project manger Regis Gatarayiha says: “Rwanda will be the first country in Africa to use Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial.” And the Treasury may cash in on selling services to Rwandans and the region. The project has increased the reliability of local Frequency Modulation (FM) stations and TV signal coverage across the country especially in Western and Northern region. Gatarayiha is optimistic that by the year 2010, Rwanda would have gained enough experience to broadcast the World Cup in the country and in the region. Already Rwanda Television, CNN, South African Broadcasting Corporation Africa and BBC are benefiting from the mast on Karisimbi summit. Gatarayiha said that they don’t have accurate figures on how the coverage has increased but soon they intend to conduct a coverage survey as requested by authorities to know which parts of the country are covered and where they need to boost their signal. Managers of the Karisimbi project say will soon start providing broadband internet services using Karisimbi signals. When completed, it is hopped these digital signals will boost the speed of internet connectivity, unlike cables or wireless internet said to be slow and costly. Ends
