Italy is the first South European country to begin putting plans into motion to switch over its DTT signals to the DVB-T2 HEVC standard, freeing up to 700Mhz frequency band for high-speed 5G internet services.
Italy’s telecom authority AgCom has announced it will finish preparing its plans by May 31st 2018, ahead of the switchover which is planned for January 2020.
According to an estimation by the Italian government, around 40 million TVs in the country will need to be adapted to accommodate the new standard, and has announced that a public subsidy will be put into place to smooth the transition.
So far, Germany, the Czech Republic and Finland are the only EU countries that have begun to implement a switchover.
