Poor people to receive support for TV digitalisation

More than VND1.7 trillion, or US$81 million, will be spent from the Viet Nam Public utility Telecommunication Service Fund to help poor households replace analogue televisions with digital ones.

This is part of the country's plan for television digitalisation in which analogue TVs would be eased out in the five biggest cities by 2015, said Deputy Minister of Information and Telecommunication and head of the plan steering committee Le Nam Thang.

More than VND1.7 trillion, or US$81 million, will be spent from the Viet Nam Public utility Telecommunication Service Fund to help poor households replace analogue televisions with digital ones.

Thang said that under the plan, they were conducting a survey on television usage by households and making a list of beneficiaries who would get support.

The beneficiaries include poor and near-poor households and families which get preferential treatment for their contribution to the country's revolution, he said. The disbursement would be in line with the steps being taken to spread digital TV technology, he added.

The ministry also recommended that people should buy Vietnamese set-top boxes with digital TVs to save money and to receive television signals conveniently.

From May onwards, all TV sets sold in Viet Nam have to compatible with receiving digital signals.

In the first phase, the national plan on television digitalization will be implemented in Ha Noi, HCM City, Hai Phong, Da Nang and Can Tho. The switch to digital TV will be made before December 31, 2015.

In the second phase, with the deadline of December 31, 2016, the plan will be carried out in 26 provinces.

The third phase will be implemented in 18 provinces by December 31, 2018. And in the fourth one, digitalisation will be implemented in the remote provinces in the north and the central region.

Analog and digital signals are used to transmit information, usually through electric signals. In both these technologies, the information such as audio or video is transformed into electric signals. The difference between analog and digital technologies is that in analog technology, the information is translated into electric pulses of varying amplitude. In digital technology, the information is translated into binary format (zero or one) where each bit is representative of two distinct amplitudes.

A main difference between analogue and digital signals is that an analogue signal is continuous and a digital signal is discrete. Analog technologies record waveforms as they are, while digital technologies convert analog signals into numbers. Digital communication systems offer much more efficiency, better performance and much greater flexibility than analogue technology.