Business News of Thursday, 12 March 2015
Source: Citifmonline.com
The Ministry of Communications is set to select a new vendor to facilitate Ghana’s migration from analogue television broadcasting to Digital Terrestrial Television next week.
This comes after a ruling by a commercial court in Accra on Monday, March 9, 2015 that government can go ahead with the migration after a Chinese firm star communications sought to place an injunction on its takeoff following the abrogation of its contract by the communications ministry.
Citi Business News has gathered that, following the termination of Star Communication’s contract, the Ministry of Communications commenced the process for the selection of a new vendor.
Seventeen companies, including local and international ones have so far shown interest. Speaking to Citi Business News Deputy Minister of communication Ato Sarpong said government hopes to appoint a new vendor by close of next week.
“We have seventeen vendors who have sent in interesting expression of interest and now that the court has ruled, we are going to sit and start a review of the various expression of interest that we received. We will shortlist them quickly by the end of this week, and then next week we will get an evaluating team together and then we will take a decision by the end of the week and then a role out a plan and commence.”
The Deputy Minister of Communications told Citi Business News that in the pre-expression of interest advertisement they indicated that they wanted the role out to be executed in 12 months from the date of the award which is expected to be done latest by the first of April 2015 with a deadline of executing the project in 9 months.
He stressed that the Ministry of Communication was optimistic that Ghana will by the close of this year fully migrate to the DTT platform.