Over 60% against ... but "more channels". OK solely money driven then.
I have somewhere around 12 FM radios, ranging in price from £10 to £lots and 40 years old or newer. They all still work and often give LW and SW too.
In the UK at least DAB is mp2 and an excuse to put out thousands of channels at horrible bit rates. Like down to 64k streams. OK for a noisy car, terrble for at home or headphones.
They all work and put out sound in sync (nb except the new denon micro system that for some reason must be using digital stage in processing fm meaning the sound comes .5s later). I often leave the radio on in several rooms when moving around, so this is especially annoying.
They degrade in poor signal "nicer" than DAB and remain listenable longer. FM has infinitely better coverage across the country.
For the battery powered ones they're at least an order or two of magnitude better battery life. DAB is horrific for portables.
OK, so you switch off a completely fine technology with billions invested, rendering useless multi-millions of fine working radios. For what? I think this will be the death blow to radio. People will not go DAB if not absolutely needed, they will essentially try to go "internet" directly and thereby eliminating classic "radio". Maybe you'll use the DAB in your car sometimes, but I can't imagine it will happen that you replace every FM radio in your house (alarm clock, kitchen radio, TV, legacy hifi-systems, etc...) with DAB now. In those cases, you'll switch so a full online solution like one of the gazillions internet radio stations. FM is dead with DAB. My prediction: "Radio" will something you'll probably find in cars - but almost nowhere else. The user base will be crippled totally, rendering "classic" radio into something unprofitable, as revenue from ads will go down. But as I am a digital child, I also look forward: being a podcaster now in the right countries could be unexpectedly monetarily interesting.
It's not just a matter of the cost of switching either.
I own a synthesizer (OP-1) that has a built-in FM receiver for sampling and for fun. Creativity-vise, it's an ingenious feature. Essentially, you can pull new sounds out of thin air whenever you feel like it. No need to connect or set anything up.
Why does it work so well? The receiver is cheap, the radio service is free, the way it works is universal and it's something reliably present in most countries. DAB sounds like it will not have any of these properties initially, and it will never have all of those properties.
My point is that the combination of those features enabled companies to create innumerable innovative appliances that use radio (from cheap radio clock to my Swedish synth). Switching to DAB will not only make existing devices useless, it will also kill the possibility of having new innovative applications in the future.
...
This kind of stuff bothers me, because it's increasingly common these days. People replace reliable, working technologies with something "modern" and claim they are making progress, while completely ignoring higher level architectural considerations.
Consider another thing: the money spent on this kind of stuff can be instead spent on making better Internet infrastructure, which can house digital TV, digital radio, digital phones, but also websites, online games, (soon) connected VR spaces, and things we can't even imagine yet.
...and Cars are not there yet. We have strong campaign for DAB once a year here in Germany to remind people that there is something like DAB+. We had one this year again. Thats when I realized that despite using so many rental cars, I haven't seen one with DAB. So I guess it's an extra you have to pay for more then for FM.
I don't know anyone having a DAB radio. I guess people remember the DVBT debacle from a few years ago when they took away the analogue TV program. In the years that followed more and more TV stations dropped out of the DVBT portfolio which was also mostly only available around big cities. Now they come with DVBT2. New hardware, less TV stations and pay options for what you once got for free.
It's a sad rip off strategy and I'm really sorry for radio. Luckily the data plans over here are ridiculous and I hope the resistance will be stronger.
Radio as being the primary source of audio-only data has been long dead, and the audio-only source has also seen competition of TV, RL (due to easier & cheaper forms of travel), and the Internet. In that sense even TV is dead thanks to the Internet. Both deaths are relative, not absolute.
Radio is however very much alive in the sense that audio-only is alive. Just look at streaming services such as Spotify, and the diversity possible with it. You can make your own playlist, follow someone else's, or collaborate. You can have multiple playlists, too. For a mere 10 EUR a month you even get rid of all the advertising (15 EUR for family pack of 6 people). I'm not advertising for Spotify here; its just one of the many options available and I happen to be familiar with it.
My Nokia N900, an experimental device from 2009, had a FM transmitter on it. One could tune in on car audio, to receive the signal send from the Nokia N900. One could power it up with the car's charger.
We're now in 2017, 8 years down the line. Its not far fetched to have a FM to Bluetooth or FM to WiFi converter. Exactly for situations where backwards compatibility is desirable. It might also be worth it to upgrade the car to more recent standards e.g. an Android mini computer made for the car.
> OK, so you switch off a completely fine technology with billions invested, rendering useless multi-millions of fine working radios.
FM radio in Norway sucked so much because of mountains. Every fjord had its own tiny repeater, but only if there was at least one inhabitant, otherwise you heard nothing. The cell-phone digital network is much more advanced, the antennas are on mountain tops and there is always coverage within few hundred meters.
Problem is DAB coverage sucks compared to FM, it's not an improvement. In the Western Norway with hundreds of tunnels only the bigger ones are equipped with radio relays. Plenty of dead spots outside major highways too.
I had to drive Bergen-Voss 4x last June around the time a landslide ruined E16, taking a different detour each time. Very spotty in the tunnels along Hardanger, which is a major route. Even worse out there along fv344 which goes mostly on the surface, but through numerous tiny valleys.
There was a talk about postponing the FM sunset, which would be wise given that majority of vehicles don't have DAB support, and some of the most popular models are still sold without DAB tuners. Either way, DAB is an unfortunate transitional technology. Sounded nice in 2000, obsolete now. I concur that 4G network streaming would make much more sense in this era.
Add to that tunnels. In western Norway one drives up to 10% of time in tunnels and only very few channels and only in longer tunnels have coverage. Mobile networks work reliably most of the time.
On one hand, spectrum is a precious resource and no one would ever forfeit it without a mandate. OTOH don't you just love the simplicity of the FM radio? I can say that I've never found one that doesn't work.
Sometimes I don't want to troubleshoot, I just want to listen to the radio on my way to work. ;)
> 'We are simply not ready for this yet'
Well, Norway, maybe if you were a big exporter or even importer of automobiles, your legislation would light a fire under some major manufacturers. But you're just not big enough of a consumer.
The article didn't talk about why? It's not as if the FM bandwidth is particularly valuable, being quite a low frequency. Unlike digital tv, there doesn't seem to be a particularly pressing reason to do this; if broadcasters are happy to keep broadcasting on FM, why stop them?
It's because the infrastructure for FM is quite expensive to run. Because of all the fjords and valleys, you need many weak transmitters to avoid reflections. Also, because it's FM, they can't overlap in frequency.
With DAB, two time-delayed signals (either reflections or multiple towers transmitting the same data-fountain) will enhance the signal. This means that you can have fewer towers.
There is only one reason. It's much more efficient. Engineers have to keep slicing things thinner and thinner to accommodate more and more people and needs. This impacts everything. Food, water, shelter, medications, transportation, communications, etc. Efficiency is king. It has to be.
Consensus from a lunch table in Norway: It was stupid to spend money on DAB now, it happens right as people move from radio to streaming. Many will move to streaming on 4G instead of DAB (which seems to have as good coverage or better, at least for me...then consider if the money spent on DAB had been spent on cellular instead).
The populist party that kicked it off in the first place is now the only party to oppose it, now that they know it is too late to do something about it...
I doubt that 4G is capabable of replacing FM/DAB. Radio is broadcast, 4G is individual streams. For a whole morning queue full of cars, that's a lot of bandwidth.
Probably the next generation will be good enough to handle it.
But this still ignores other benefits of DAB over mobile data. One is emergency broadcasts, the other is future-proofing. DAB will probably be a standard for decades. But what if you want built-in streaming in your car, which standard do you support? There are none. You have to have apps. Do you think your car will still get software updates for those in 10 years?
I also think we tech geeks overestimate the popularity of streaming in cars. Hell, I'm a geek but even I actually prefer radio when driving.
What do we do with more channels that we can't listen? If you really need a little bit of bandwidth around 100 MHz for other use, you could cut the spectrum from FM radio and still keep it running.
The place where I usually listen to radio is the car. Car radios don't have DAB receivers. They all have FM receivers. And these days most cars have radio units that are integrated to the car electronics, steering wheel controls etc - so it's not that easy to just get a new radio that fits the hole.
If I get rid of FM radio, I will not replace it with DAB. I'll listen to some streaming service over IP.
The whole car radio situation hasn't be handled correctly by politicians, at least not here in Denmark. When regular service began, in 2002 in the case of Denmark, politicians should have parsed regulation that required all new cars to be delivered with DAB radio within a certain time frame.
You can get a DAB/DAB+ radio in your new car, but you'll have to pay extra. At this point is should simply be the default, otherwise a migration will never be well received.
Well, that's a chicken-egg situation, cars won't get DAB+ radio's until there's DAB+ broadcasts and it won't really be accelerated until FM is closely on the horizon to be shut off.
Similarly it took quite a while for the first CD players to appear in cars, and a lot of older cars only had casette tapes, keeping casettes alive for quite a while longer just for car use.
Sweden narrowly avoided this, there was a very strong drive, but in the end the responsibie minister halted it. One of the few pieces of happy news in later years.
It is a real shame that the US went with the proprietary HD Radio scheme. The devices are so expensive and there hardly are any available. Just now I couldn't even find anything less than $100. What a scam. I feel sorry for all the radio stations that wasted money on this. Would DAB be able to gain ground in the US?
There's a huge marketing / awareness campaign going on right now in Norway to get people to upgrade their FM radios.
I wonder if the radio stations will realize too late that they're throwing away their one advantage (ubiquity) and maybe the option some people will choose when the car radio stops working is to not listen to radio at all.
I visited my hometown over the holidays, and the first thing I did after getting into the rental car was tune into the local Alt Rock FM station. The playlists (and most of the DJs) haven't change in the 10 years since high school. I kinda loved it.
It is a complete and utter travesty perpetrated by politicians who were convinced by snake oil/electronics salesmen of the (highly dubious) superiority of DAB, and now have too much skin in the game to turn back.
Personally, I've been working lately on building an ESP8266/VS1053 based webradio into my nice old wooden 1960s radio. I'm using the variable plate capacitor for the AM tuner as input for channel selection, so for all the world it will look like a still-working FM tuner. Total BOM cost will be <$30.
If you're going to take FM radio and slice into a bunch of digital channels, it'd be interesting to make one or two citizens' bands. I know CB is kind of a mess but I like the idea that the music radio in your car could receive and perhaps even transmit on the local band.
Well congrats to the hams in this country. They're going to get a huge bandwidth that others would be envious enough.
They could also explain to people that just switching modes isn't going to make reception better. If you're having propagation issues then you'd be much better off working on getting repeaters setup on high mountains.
The worst thing about DAB for me is that any signal interruption causes complete lack of sound, and then my car takes at least 5 seconds to tune back in. It's extremely infuriating - I much prefer FM radio which gets noisy, but at least you can continue listening, even when driving through poor signal area.
It can be set independently per station. As an example, in Norway the NRK Jazz channel transmits at 64 kbit/s, while NRK Klassisk (classical music) transmits at 96 kbit/s.
I wonder how smooth the switch will be (the article says cars are a big problem due to the price). I'd imagine quite a few people won't upgrade their car radio and you'd think...so what radio is way to retro let's just stream stuff and listen to mp3s/ogg.
I don't know if owning a radio is legally required in Norway but if it isn't I can see the radio ownership going down. Once again you may ask so what?
The biggest issue (for me) is that radio plays an essential part in crisis management. Imagine a long term power outage or some other crisis. With radios it's mostly a matter of keeping stations running and making sure the population knows that a battery powered (or crank powered) radio such as a car radio will work during a power outage. That's one of the few reliable ways of mass-communicating important information during power outages.
It would be cheaper to develop a system for mass-SMS in a crisis and publicize it than to keep FM/DAB running, and I bet the delivery rate of the crisis message would be an order of magnitude higher.
The NPR One radio app costs me an extra $20 dollars a month due to high data usage. And NPR gets none of that cash. If my phone had user facing FM tuning I could probably contribute directly to content creators.
I wonder if shutting down FM and replacing it with much more expensive mobile data is a conspiracy by cellular carriers?
This is all about lobbying politicians. Very hard to understand why they want to set aside separate bandwidth for different sorts of media, when Internet access would provide all we needed.
We have digital radio, digital television broadcast, separate emergency frequencies and so goes the list.
What about gathering around standard that work and are already in place? What about making cell phone and Internet connectivity more robust?
But no. Let's throw billions in taxes down the drain. For instance: The emergency network fails when there's a storm. Then we're back to RHF!
From the inhabitant perspective, this is all a power party. A few people with high positions get to make big decisions and pat each other's back. I'm sure the CEOs of the businesses getting the contracts are good at patting backs too.
Good thing we already pay so much taxes we don't even notice the difference.
Except for the bumpy roads and understaffed elderly homes.
Errr - are you really suggesting that we really move all broadcast media to TCP/IP? You're going to give free streaming plans to everyone in the country?
Or does it perhaps make sense to use dedicated broadcast technology for free-to-air broadcasts?
[+] [-] anexprogrammer|9 years ago|reply
I have somewhere around 12 FM radios, ranging in price from £10 to £lots and 40 years old or newer. They all still work and often give LW and SW too.
In the UK at least DAB is mp2 and an excuse to put out thousands of channels at horrible bit rates. Like down to 64k streams. OK for a noisy car, terrble for at home or headphones.
They all work and put out sound in sync (nb except the new denon micro system that for some reason must be using digital stage in processing fm meaning the sound comes .5s later). I often leave the radio on in several rooms when moving around, so this is especially annoying.
They degrade in poor signal "nicer" than DAB and remain listenable longer. FM has infinitely better coverage across the country.
For the battery powered ones they're at least an order or two of magnitude better battery life. DAB is horrific for portables.
[+] [-] geff82|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romaniv|9 years ago|reply
I own a synthesizer (OP-1) that has a built-in FM receiver for sampling and for fun. Creativity-vise, it's an ingenious feature. Essentially, you can pull new sounds out of thin air whenever you feel like it. No need to connect or set anything up.
Why does it work so well? The receiver is cheap, the radio service is free, the way it works is universal and it's something reliably present in most countries. DAB sounds like it will not have any of these properties initially, and it will never have all of those properties.
My point is that the combination of those features enabled companies to create innumerable innovative appliances that use radio (from cheap radio clock to my Swedish synth). Switching to DAB will not only make existing devices useless, it will also kill the possibility of having new innovative applications in the future.
...
This kind of stuff bothers me, because it's increasingly common these days. People replace reliable, working technologies with something "modern" and claim they are making progress, while completely ignoring higher level architectural considerations.
Consider another thing: the money spent on this kind of stuff can be instead spent on making better Internet infrastructure, which can house digital TV, digital radio, digital phones, but also websites, online games, (soon) connected VR spaces, and things we can't even imagine yet.
[+] [-] aluhut|9 years ago|reply
I don't know anyone having a DAB radio. I guess people remember the DVBT debacle from a few years ago when they took away the analogue TV program. In the years that followed more and more TV stations dropped out of the DVBT portfolio which was also mostly only available around big cities. Now they come with DVBT2. New hardware, less TV stations and pay options for what you once got for free.
It's a sad rip off strategy and I'm really sorry for radio. Luckily the data plans over here are ridiculous and I hope the resistance will be stronger.
[+] [-] Fnoord|9 years ago|reply
Did CD and MP3 players kill radio in car? No.
Radio as being the primary source of audio-only data has been long dead, and the audio-only source has also seen competition of TV, RL (due to easier & cheaper forms of travel), and the Internet. In that sense even TV is dead thanks to the Internet. Both deaths are relative, not absolute.
Radio is however very much alive in the sense that audio-only is alive. Just look at streaming services such as Spotify, and the diversity possible with it. You can make your own playlist, follow someone else's, or collaborate. You can have multiple playlists, too. For a mere 10 EUR a month you even get rid of all the advertising (15 EUR for family pack of 6 people). I'm not advertising for Spotify here; its just one of the many options available and I happen to be familiar with it.
My Nokia N900, an experimental device from 2009, had a FM transmitter on it. One could tune in on car audio, to receive the signal send from the Nokia N900. One could power it up with the car's charger.
We're now in 2017, 8 years down the line. Its not far fetched to have a FM to Bluetooth or FM to WiFi converter. Exactly for situations where backwards compatibility is desirable. It might also be worth it to upgrade the car to more recent standards e.g. an Android mini computer made for the car.
> OK, so you switch off a completely fine technology with billions invested, rendering useless multi-millions of fine working radios.
Keyword: Maintenance. It costs money.
[+] [-] Already__Taken|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timonoko|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varjag|9 years ago|reply
I had to drive Bergen-Voss 4x last June around the time a landslide ruined E16, taking a different detour each time. Very spotty in the tunnels along Hardanger, which is a major route. Even worse out there along fv344 which goes mostly on the surface, but through numerous tiny valleys.
There was a talk about postponing the FM sunset, which would be wise given that majority of vehicles don't have DAB support, and some of the most popular models are still sold without DAB tuners. Either way, DAB is an unfortunate transitional technology. Sounded nice in 2000, obsolete now. I concur that 4G network streaming would make much more sense in this era.
[+] [-] _0w8t|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wyldfire|9 years ago|reply
Sometimes I don't want to troubleshoot, I just want to listen to the radio on my way to work. ;)
> 'We are simply not ready for this yet'
Well, Norway, maybe if you were a big exporter or even importer of automobiles, your legislation would light a fire under some major manufacturers. But you're just not big enough of a consumer.
[+] [-] userbinator|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio
[+] [-] askvictor|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krkoch|9 years ago|reply
With DAB, two time-delayed signals (either reflections or multiple towers transmitting the same data-fountain) will enhance the signal. This means that you can have fewer towers.
[+] [-] w8rbt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Johnythree|9 years ago|reply
It has much better ability to penetrate into buildings, and through foliage, etc.
[+] [-] dagss|9 years ago|reply
The populist party that kicked it off in the first place is now the only party to oppose it, now that they know it is too late to do something about it...
[+] [-] audunw|9 years ago|reply
Probably the next generation will be good enough to handle it.
But this still ignores other benefits of DAB over mobile data. One is emergency broadcasts, the other is future-proofing. DAB will probably be a standard for decades. But what if you want built-in streaming in your car, which standard do you support? There are none. You have to have apps. Do you think your car will still get software updates for those in 10 years?
I also think we tech geeks overestimate the popularity of streaming in cars. Hell, I'm a geek but even I actually prefer radio when driving.
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptaipale|9 years ago|reply
The place where I usually listen to radio is the car. Car radios don't have DAB receivers. They all have FM receivers. And these days most cars have radio units that are integrated to the car electronics, steering wheel controls etc - so it's not that easy to just get a new radio that fits the hole.
If I get rid of FM radio, I will not replace it with DAB. I'll listen to some streaming service over IP.
[+] [-] mrweasel|9 years ago|reply
You can get a DAB/DAB+ radio in your new car, but you'll have to pay extra. At this point is should simply be the default, otherwise a migration will never be well received.
[+] [-] dtech|9 years ago|reply
Similarly it took quite a while for the first CD players to appear in cars, and a lot of older cars only had casette tapes, keeping casettes alive for quite a while longer just for car use.
[+] [-] martinald|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aoyagi|9 years ago|reply
It's not like anyone was asked when digital TV was the only thing left working..
[+] [-] hzhzjsj|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mongol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] th0ma5|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicky0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snom380|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if the radio stations will realize too late that they're throwing away their one advantage (ubiquity) and maybe the option some people will choose when the car radio stops working is to not listen to radio at all.
[+] [-] dagss|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bearcobra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonko1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrause|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] semi-extrinsic|9 years ago|reply
Personally, I've been working lately on building an ESP8266/VS1053 based webradio into my nice old wooden 1960s radio. I'm using the variable plate capacitor for the AM tuner as input for channel selection, so for all the world it will look like a still-working FM tuner. Total BOM cost will be <$30.
[+] [-] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
I mean just imagine that the plans to scrap FM and go digital were made before mobile broadband, podcasts and streaming music.
Before they would have sworn billions, every person and every car would already be streaming internet audio anyway.
That's what will happen in norway.
[+] [-] brian-armstrong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gravypod|9 years ago|reply
They could also explain to people that just switching modes isn't going to make reception better. If you're having propagation issues then you'd be much better off working on getting repeaters setup on high mountains.
[+] [-] dtech|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Johnythree|9 years ago|reply
The band will immediately be re-assigned to other licensed services.
[+] [-] voltagex_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gambiting|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snom380|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l1ambda|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|9 years ago|reply
I don't know if owning a radio is legally required in Norway but if it isn't I can see the radio ownership going down. Once again you may ask so what?
The biggest issue (for me) is that radio plays an essential part in crisis management. Imagine a long term power outage or some other crisis. With radios it's mostly a matter of keeping stations running and making sure the population knows that a battery powered (or crank powered) radio such as a car radio will work during a power outage. That's one of the few reliable ways of mass-communicating important information during power outages.
[+] [-] dagss|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catdog|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frozenport|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if shutting down FM and replacing it with much more expensive mobile data is a conspiracy by cellular carriers?
[+] [-] Aoyagi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ringe|9 years ago|reply
We have digital radio, digital television broadcast, separate emergency frequencies and so goes the list.
What about gathering around standard that work and are already in place? What about making cell phone and Internet connectivity more robust?
But no. Let's throw billions in taxes down the drain. For instance: The emergency network fails when there's a storm. Then we're back to RHF!
From the inhabitant perspective, this is all a power party. A few people with high positions get to make big decisions and pat each other's back. I'm sure the CEOs of the businesses getting the contracts are good at patting backs too.
Good thing we already pay so much taxes we don't even notice the difference.
Except for the bumpy roads and understaffed elderly homes.
[+] [-] Angostura|9 years ago|reply
Or does it perhaps make sense to use dedicated broadcast technology for free-to-air broadcasts?