To demodulate the received OFDM signal, symbol timing detection which finds symbol start in the received sample stream is required in the system initialization. In this paper, we analyze the effect of symbol timing offset and propose a new symbol timing detection algorithm, which is using the guard interval. The proposed algorithm requires low computational process and small memory size, and dose not be affected by frequency offset and phase offset. In addition, We apply this algorithm to European digital TV broadcasting model based on OFDM to evaluate the performance in AWGN and multipath fading channel by the computer simulation.