Tata Sky subscribers across the country had been facing loss of signal since 5PM. Most of the channels were appearing blank with ‘No signal’ message displaying. Channel number 100 shows a message “Dear customer we are upgrading to serve you better. If you are unable to view channels send NS to 56633 from your RMN and we will call back”.
It seems Tata is upgrading its Satellite used for transmitting the signals for DTH. Tata Sky had been using INSAT 4A for the transmission of signals but this was coming to the end of its life and Tata had been looking for another viable satellite with the desired transponder capacity for taking over the functions of the INSAT 4A. A few years back they were looking at switching over to GSAT 10 but the Department of Space (DoS) had delayed the launching of this satellite which had forced Tata to look for foreign satellites with surplus transponder capacity.
Tata sky was facing bandwidth crunch over the past few years which restricted it from adding more HD channels. To overcome this in the short term, Tata upgraded its services from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 with higher compression thus enabling more channels per transponder since switching to the 12 Ku-band transponders of GSAT 10 would not solve the issue of bandwidth limitation just increase the lifespan of the transponders by another 10 years. The failure of DoS to launch the satellite GSAT 10 in time led to a huge loss to the government as Tata turned to foreign satellite for transponder capacity.
Hopefully with today’s switch we will soon get to see more SD and HD channels being added to Tata Sky. As of now the transmission is almost back to normal but still a little disruption persists.
