Colombia. Rohde & Schwarz was the company that won the contract for the acquisition, installation and commissioning of the first phase of the Digital Terrestrial Television Transmission System, awarded by Radio Televisión Nacional de Colombia, RTVC.
The contract, which has a value of $30.2 billion, will allow the country's public channels, national and regional, to have the digital TV system from the second quarter of 2014. The beneficiaries of this contract are Señalcolombia, Señal Institucional, Telantioquia, Telecafé, Telecaribe, Telepacífico and TRO.
Juan Pachón, broadcast engineer at Rohde & Schwarz, explained to TV y Video that his company had been working on this project since the choice of the standard in 2008, accompanying RTVC and the channels continuously throughout the faces that were implemented.
Within eight months, they must put into service 14 stations of the primary network, located in the main cities of the country, including Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Bucaramanga, Cúcuta, Pereira and its surrounding areas, they expect to cover 51.8% of the Colombian population.
RTVC highlighted that the award was made through an innovative contracting process, which allowed the acquisition of state-of-the-art digital terrestrial television equipment and saved more than $7 billion.
In this regard, Juan Pachón indicated that the savings were due to cost optimization, direct work with technology suppliers, achieving competitive prices and complying with the high technical standard of the tender. In addition, the commitment of the Rohde & Schwarz Headquarters to the project and development of digital TV in Colombia.
He concluded that "this project consolidates us as leaders in the Colombian market in the deployment of digital terrestrial TV. Now the network of public channels will have the same technology that the country's private channels have already installed."
