Of course, the greatest virtue of terrestrial television is the ease with which it can reach swathes of households with minimal expenditure at the household end. Terrestrial delivery can also require the use of a satellite to facilitate re-transmission of a central signal onto a wide national or sub-national footprint. Terrestrial transmission technology is mature, largely because specifications for such transmission were standardized long ago and are now built in to a significant amount of existing equipment.

As an over-the-air signal, terrestrial television is not immune to the vagaries of the atmosphere or urban layout. Reception of an analogue television signal, as suggested by its name, is analogously impacted by weakened or bounced signals. Lower frequencies in the band of the spectrum used for television are better than the higher frequencies because signals in those frequencies suffer less from atmospheric disturbances. The lower the frequency, the longer the wavelength and the better the carried signal can withstand attenuation.

One of the virtues not yet emphasized in this discussion of digital television is the quality of reception. While terrestrial signals suffer from attenuation and can be reflected by surfaces (which would generate ghost signals in analogue television), the bitstream carried by the affected portion of a digitized signal is either interpreted correctly or is not interpreted at all. In theory, for the fraction of a second that the equivalent pixels should light up on the screen, one should either see the image (or portion of an image) or not.

The US and UK markets are the most advanced in rolling out digital terrestrial television( DTT). In the Asia-Pacific region, the Japanese government has proposed quick adoption of DTT. But network broadcasters, possibly at the behest of their smaller local and regional affiliate stations, are balking at the introduction of DTT, claiming that costs will be too high. Australia views the year 2000 as a starting date for permanent DTT broadcasting with an earlier experimental phase possible.

International Firm Plans for Digital Terrestrial Television Service

During our visits to regional low-to-middle-income markets, we have been genuinely surprised by the lack of awareness concerning developments in digital terrestrial television. While we expected regulators to be continually "catching up", we did not expect commercial operators to be as unfamiliar with the details of DTT as they appeared to be. Local operators must come up to speed quickly, lest operators of other delivery systems, particularly satellite, gain an advantage.

Terrestrial television delivery is simply not suited for the full support of networks. Terrestrial operators must combine their strength in delivering downstream signals to large portions of the audience with those of other operators capable of providing upstream services. This will most likely continue to be the telephone companies.