Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) has said the FM Spectrum refarming exercise which is being conducted will provide a long-lasting solution to the challenges that the broadcasting industry has been experiencing in the country.
The project which started in December 2022 and expected to close in January 2024 is being conducted through a Taskforce comprising MACRA Staff and Engineers from the Broadcasting Industry.
MACRA Director General Daudi Suleman said the exercise will help to address country’s broadcasting challenges of Frequency hoarding, Failure to pay for frequencies, and Depletion of frequencies in all the cities.
“On our simulation we are looking at changing what we call the divide factor between one radio to another, currently the divide factor is at 400 MHz we want to reduce it to 200 MHz once we have done that it means in an area we can now accommodate 100 existing broadcasters that will be a bigger number from the numbers we are currently operating with per area” said Suleman
He also warned individuals who are allocating themselves FM frequencies illigally saying MACRA will take action against such people as a way of sanitizing the FM Spectrum re-farming exercise.
On his part Haswel Solomon, the Director of Engineering for Zodiak and chairperson of the project’s task force commended MACRA for the exercise which he believes will improve transmission in different sites in the country.
“We feel it’s a very important exercise we know how we are struggling interms of assignments when we want to do transmission in other sites you can’t just find a Frequency so we feel when the exercise is done with new assignment we should be able to broadcast wherever we want so it’s a very important exercise for us” said Solomon
The FM Spectrum re-farming exercise is being conducted to realize free channels in the 87.5 – 108 MHz band to accommodate more licensees.
