Arqiva is a leading UK communications infrastructure company. An independent provider of telecom towers, with circa 8,000 active sites across Great Britain, they are also the only supplier of national terrestrial television and radio broadcasting services in the UK. Their advanced networks support the exponential growth of connected devices and the ever-increasing demand for data from smartphones to tablets through to connected TVs and smart meters
The digital switchover programme (DSO) was the largest broadcast engineering project ever undertaken in the UK; everyone in the UK who watches TV was affected.
This was a five-year programme across the entire UK from the tip of Scotland, across NI and Wales to the south of England with an investment of £630 million and 1,200 man-years of work. Fuel were responsible for the vast majority of resource used on the project from Project Managers, Site Managers, Antenna Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Health and Safety officers, Transmitter Engineers and Programme Directors.
Fuel placed over 475 permanent and contingent candidates over the 5-year period to meet the demand of the DSO Project.
- Digital switch over brought digital terrestrial TV to homes across the length and breadth of the UK
- 1,200 man-years of work over a five-year period
- New masts in five separate locations
- Decommissioned 80 former low-power digital TV sites and 1,154 analogue systems
“The project is on-time and has run brilliantly smoothly. Switching to digital TV provides people with more channels while freeing up valuable spectrum.”
Ed Vaizey – UK Government Communications Minister
