MagtiSAT Helps Ushguli Villagers to ‘Go Digital’
Aiming to help Georgian rural areas in the digitalization process, MagtiCom, a Georgian mobile and telecommunication company has made MagtiSat’s digital satellite television signal available to each household of Ushguli – the highest village in Europe, located at an altitude of 2200 meters in Svaneti region.
The project has reached 63 households, of which 28 were already subscribed to MagtiSat. The remaining 35 households went digital on June 3-4 and now benefit from a superior quality of satellite signal with 19 Georgian channels free of charge.
“We are delighted to be able to provide high quality satellite digital TV to every family of Ushguli,” stated Irakli Lobzhanidze, Marketing Director at MagtiCom. “By launching this socially important project, MagtiCom is accelerating Georgia’s switchover to digital TV broadcasting. We realize that the forthcoming analogue switch-off brings both opportunities and challenges and we wanted to demonstrate that satellite broadcasting is an ideal solution for countries like Georgia.”
The first domestic direct-to-home (DTH) platform in Georgia offers more than 100 channels in 3 packages to its subscribers: Georgian (19 channels), Medium (76 channels) and Full (105 channels) broadcasted via SES’s Astra 5B satellite, which covers the whole territory of Georgia and the signal is available across the country including remote and mountainous areas.
Locals expressed their gratitude towards the company for allowing them to go digital. One such local, Vano Nizaradze, stated that because of frequent weather changes, the satellites they previously had would switch off, while the new ones haven’t experienced any such problem yet; while fellow villager Bezan Qvachliani added that with the old satellites they had only 4 channels to choose from and now they have more sources of information.
“Digitalization of the highest village of Europe is a unique experience not only for Georgia but also for the whole region,” Hеkan Sjцdin, Vice President of Sales Nordic, Baltic and Eastern Europe at SES said, adding that satellite is an ideal complement to other forms of distribution and can quickly and easily provide services to geographical areas where other solutions are neither economically nor practically viable.
Baia Dzagnidze