DVB-T technically superior to ISDB-T: SADIBA
SADIBA (Southern African Digital Broadcasting Association) recently released a comparison of the DVB-T and ISDB-T digital broadcasting standards based on information that was supplied to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
The comparison looks at error-correction, data framing, modulation and emission methods for DTT broadcasting systems.
In simpler terms: SADIBA drew conclusions about which standard is capable of delivering the highest capacity at the lowest transmitter power over the largest coverage area while using the least amount of spectrum.
DVB-T and ISDB-Tb: The saga in brief
The South African Department of Communications (DoC) surprised local stakeholders when ex-director general Mamodupi Mohlala announced that South Africa hadn’t selected a standard for digital terrestrial television (DTT) standard.
Many industry players, including e.tv and M-Net rejected the DoC’s claim, pointing to the Broadcasting Digital Migration Plan (BDMP) gazetted by the department itself, as well as regulations published by ICASA earlier this year.
Both the BDMP and the regulations addressed Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial (DVB-T) as South Africa’s chosen DTT broadcasting standard.
There has been a back and forth of claims and counter claims by the proponents of DVB-T and ISDB-Tb. ISDB-Tb is the Brazillian version of the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting – Terrestrial standard which was originally developed in Japan.
The two standards are seen as the most likely to be chosen for use in South Africa. Sentech is set to host a ‘questions and answers’ session today regarding a trial of ISDB-T which they were commissioned to run.
Comparison of ITU data
SADIBA released a presentation last week which compares DVB-T and ISDB-T, which they say is based entirely on information published by the ITU.
According to SADIBA the presentation provides an examination of the ITU recommendations that deal with error-correction, data framing, modulation and emission methods for DTT broadcasting systems.
These ITU recommendations can be found in ITU-R BT.1306-4 (09/2009). ITU-R BT.1877 (05/2010) deals with 2nd generation DTT broadcasting systems.
SADIBA said that such a comparison “is probably the most objective way of comparing the relative performance of the DTT systems.” This is because the data used for the analysis stems directly from information submitted to the ITU by the respective ITU members (i.e. the proponents of the respective technologies), SADIBA said.
The comparison looked at ISDB-T and DVB-T in their most and least robust configurations. SADIBA explains that the most robust configurations yield the lowest data rate whereas the least robust configurations yield the highest data rate.
Conclusion
In both configurations DVB-T requires lower transmitter power to deliver slightly more data than ISDB-T and can be deployed over a 19% larger network area without the risk of self-interference.
SADIBA explains that the self-interference comparison indicates how efficient a standard is with the spectrum it broadcasts on. Based on the information provided it would seem that DVB-T is somewhat more spectrally efficient than ISDB-Tb.
The analysis of the ITU data presented by SADIBA shows that DVB-T has a performance edge above ISDB-T and that second generation DVB-T2 outperforms both DVB-T and ISDB-T by leaps and bounds.
SADIBA comparison of DVB-T and ISDB-T based on ITU information.
DVB-T technically superior to ISDB-T: SADIBA << Comments and views
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