Chinese Government provides loan for Digital Television Project (Linked to Record ID#69219, #72069)

Chinese Government provides loan for Digital Television Project On July 5, 2012, the Chinese and Cuban presidents signed eight cooperation agreements including one related to digital television. In 2013, Chinese Government provided a $5.25 million USD loan for Cuba's Digital Television Project.

The reported total cost of this project was 10.5 million Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUCs), and the CUC-to-USD exchange rate is 1:1.

Half of the cost was covered via Chinese Government grant funding (captured in #69219) and half was covered through a Chinese Government loan. .

Cuba began to look towards the so-called Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) in 2009, and on 18 March 2013, a ceremony was held in celebration of the "Havana Development Zone," in which the initial trial phase would began in June 2013. This trial covered more than fifty neighborhoods in Havana's 16 municipalities, with some 45,000 homes involved.

The Chinese decoder boxes could be obtained by residents of Havana with a payment of 7.35 Cuban pesos (approximately $0.33 at the time). In early 2014, the project was expanded to include the eastern provinces.

This included Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city in the island, where more than 1,500 decoders were distributed in the areas with difficult reception conditions to assess the signal quality, and in Holguin province, where 1,200 decoders were distributed in eight of the 14 municipalities. In November 2015, it was estimated that 60% of all Cubans had digital television transmitters.

In total, there will be 62 transmitters across the country, this includes the first 34 transmitters which were erected in 2014.

It was reported that Cuban engineers have also developed a new digital television with Chinese technology, known as ATEC-HAIER.

Glauco Guillén, general director of the Telecommunications Research and Development Institute (Lacetel), explained that during the implementation of the first phase of the project, difficulties arose with the duality of signals and a saturation of the radio spectrum, a condition that slows down the progress of the program.

There are also dissatisfactions of the population regarding the quality of signal reception in specific places in Havana, where there are five digital TV transmitting centers, which - according to the technicians - are associated with the problems of downspouts and of the antennas.

The process was predicted to take about 10-years, ending in 2021, when the analog "blackout" would occur, but in the recently concluded Forum it was pointed out that the process should extend until 2023, the year in which DTMB coverage could be guaranteed throughout the entire country. As of 2022, the project is undergoing construction.

Phases II and III of Cuba's Digital Television Deployment Program are captured in linked Record ID#72069.