TV technology organizations issue anti-interference recommendations

DigiTAG, the EBU, BNE and ACT today have issued a new set of formal recommendations aimed at ensuring the adoption of technical safeguards to protect from harmful interference television services delivered by the digital-terrestrial TV platform.

Interference may result from telecoms transmissions emitted from fixed base station towers, known as ‘downlink interference’, or from signals emitted by mobile handsets, known as ‘uplink interference’. Earlier jointly proposed  from November 2010 specifically addressed the ‘downlink interference’. In this second set of recommendations, DigiTAG, the EBU, BNE and ACT have proposed  that additional measures should be implemented to protect DTT services from ‘uplink interference’ which may otherwise be caused by LTE/UMTS terminals such as smart phones and mobile phone handsets. These terminals are generally mobile and transmit at random times, making them significantly more difficult to trace as sources of interference than the fixed downlink emissions.

Daniel Sauvet-Goichon, chairman of DigiTAG said: “Measures must be put in place to protect the quality of the viewing experience enjoyed by the many tens of millions of households across Europe that access their television via the DTT platform. It is essential for national administrations to guarantee that these viewers can continue to rely on these popular TV services without any threat of technical interference.”