While Spain, France and Portugal have still no plans regarding a necessary spectrum reorganisation prior to the commercial deployment of 5G mobile networks, Italy has become the first Southern European territory to present a strategy to roll out the new DTT.

According to the 2018 national budget sanctioned this week, Italy’s telecom authority, AgCom, will define the specifics to reorganise the broadcasting frequencies before 31 May 2018.

Then, the DVB-T2 HEVC switchover will begin in January 2020 and will last two years. According to the Italian Government’s estimations, there are around 40 million TV sets in the country that will need to be adapted to the new standard. Therefore, a public subsidy will be granted to support the purchase of DVB-T2 DTT set-top boxes.

The Italian schedule follows the European Commission’s strategy to secure the proper deployment of 5G, which is expected to start between 2020 and 2022, depending on the country.

Germany, the Czech Republic and Finland are among the few European countries already deploying the DVB-T2 standard, while most of the EU territories have no plans to carry the roll-out.