Nokia has announced that together with Emitel and Oscilloquartz, it has completed the deployment of Poland’s most advanced IP transport and synchronization network for the nationwide coverage of digital TV broadcast services. The network, designed to provide the highest quality, reliability and resiliency, will support Emitel’s DVB-T2 infrastructure with the utmost availability, through which 13 million Poles receive almost 30 TV channels in high definition.
The network is purposed to support the nationwide infrastructure for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) and multimedia distribution, as well as to meet the growing demand for data transmission like video traffic growth and internet access. Digital Terrestrial Television (DVB-T2) is the primary TV source for over 13 million Polish viewers.
The strategic decision by the Polish government and regulators to upgrade all broadcast systems to the new DVB-T2 standard required upgrading the transport network in order to increase capacity, support new applications, and ensure very high synchronization accuracy and resilience, providing viewers with consistently excellent sound and video quality. Since DVB-T2 broadcasting involves very stringent time synchronization requirements, the transport network plays a key role in ensuring network time synchronization with sub-microsecond accuracy for each DVB-T2 transmitter, protecting against signal interference and spoofing.
This transport network, comprising over 500 Nokia IP/MPLS routers across 300 locations and more than 130 advanced Primary Reference Timing Clocks by Oscilloquartz simultaneously with other infrastructure and network elements, is one of the most advanced IP/MPLS transport networks supporting time synchronization distribution in Europe today.
Marcin Guzy, Customer Team Head Poland at Nokia, said: “We are very excited to be a part of this project, bringing next-generation TV services to millions of households in Poland. This was one of the most technically advanced projects we have deployed recently. Thanks to the professionalism of the Emitel, Nokia and Oscilloquartz teams, we have proven that even the most complex network infrastructure can be put into operation within one year.”
Jerzy Godek, Board Member at Emitel S.A., said: “The frequency refarming project forced technological changes not only in the radio layer, but also in the data transmission network. It was a multidimensional project involving specialists from many branches, the most complex and demanding in history of our company. We started the preparations in 2018, and the first frequency changes were performed in March 2020. Nearly 300 of our experts were involved in the project implementation. About 40 polish and foreign companies also participated in this assignment. New, more effective DVB-T2 / HEVC broadcast standard was introduced providing better picture and sound quality – as well as new TV channels in the future.”