The National Communications Authority (NCA) says Ghana’s Digital Terrestrial Television platform is a monopoly and its tariffs will need regulatory approval, Director-General Rev. Ing. Edmund Yirenkyi Fianko said in Accra.
Fianko made the statement while receiving the final report of the Digital Terrestrial Television Committee, a body set up by the Minister for Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George, to review the platform’s finances and governance. The committee consulted the NCA, Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, the Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association, the National Media Commission and K-Net, the private firm that built and has run the national DTT infrastructure under a government contract since 2015.
“The DTT platform, as we have it today, is a monopoly,” Fianko said, adding that the Electronic Communications Act requires monopoly tariffs to pass regulatory scrutiny before they take effect.
Fianko has tracked the platform’s troubles from the start. He served as secretary to the Digital Broadcasting Migration Committee between 2010 and 2016, the body that oversaw Ghana’s shift from analogue to digital television, before rising to NCA Director-General in 2025. He said the reform now stands as a significant breakthrough even though it arrived a decade after the switchover began, calling it “a big, big step 10 years late, but better late than never.”
He said the NCA has spent that decade covering funding gaps for the platform, stepping in with its own resources whenever government allocations ran out, and that the authority also ran financial modelling to help the committee design a sustainable tariff structure. Any tariffs that emerge from the new framework will go through NCA approval before broadcasters or the platform operator can charge them, he said.
The Ministry of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations will now review the committee’s recommendations and decide on implementation steps, including how the monopoly tariff rule will apply to K-Net’s contract with the state.
