Mangaluru: Despite repeated requested by the cable operators in Dakshina Kannada to extend the deadline for the installation of set top boxes, district Additional Deputy Commissioner Kumar on Saturday December 26, confirmed that the deadline cannot be extended.
At a cable operators’ meet held at the DC office, Kumar said that he had spoken to the officials concerned at both the centre and the state levels and that they are firm on adhering to the stipulated deadline adding the deadline is uniform throughout the country and cannot be extended only for a particular district.
As a result, analogue signals in urban areas will be switched off from January 1, 2016 midnight.
There are 2 Multi-System Operators and about 120-140 cable operators in the district. According to the data collected, over 1,00,000 users are yet to install set top boxes (STB) in six days including today and there is availability of about 65,000 STBs.
Deploying STBs in such large number in the next few days is going to be a herculean task. Also, cable operators need to pay two-three rounds of visits to the customers as most of them would not be able to follow the instructions in one shot, rued the operators. Hence, they appealed for another three months time.
However, the ADC clarified that neither him nor the DC had to power to relax the deadline adding it was the duty of the cable operators to create awareness and convince the customers to install STBs on time.
The Cable Regulation Act was passed in 1995. In 2011, amendment was made to digitalize the signals in phases, according to which digitalization in cities namely Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi were done by October 2012; cities with over one million population was done by December 2012; likewise, all urban cities are to be digitalized by December 31, 2015. Rural areas will be covered in the fourth phase by the end of December 2016.
