After a Decade, Digital Radio Still an Also-Ran In UK

beschra writes "Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) was developed as early as 1981. After launching in the UK 10 years ago, only 24% of listeners listen on DAB. The article credits a good part of the delay to the fact that the technology was largely developed under the Europe-wide Eureka 147 research project. How does government vs. commercial development help or hinder acceptance of new technology? From the article: '"If Nokia develops something, they'll be bringing out the handsets before you know it," [analyst Grant Goddard says]. "Because DAB was a pan-European development, you had to have agreement from all sides before you could do anything. That meant progress was extremely slow." But this alone did not account for the hold-up. The sheer complexity of introducing and regulating the system was also a major factor, Mr. Goddard adds."'

Comments

Re:Hmm, I wonder

[FuckingNickName]

FM is simple, but who cares when you can have a DSP for a few cents these days

1. Initial system cost at receiver and even more so at transmitter end: DAB is basically Arqiva trolling every radio listener for profit, raising the bar for entry into the transmission market;
2. Upgrade timeframes - AM radio: a good century; FM radio: 40 year old commercial receivers going on fine, stereo addition is backward compatible; DAB: about 5 years as complex imperfections are persistently tweaked and old codecs become obsolete;
3. Power requirements: the limit of lack of power requirement is the AM crystal radio receiver which is powered by nothing more than the radio waves themselves - there is nothing inherently more efficient about demodulating a DAB signal, so it will always cost more to power a DAB radio because of the complexity of equipment. Currently it's at least 5x more;
4. Longevity: harder to say - even assuming that transmitters fix on a backwards compatible standard for decades, does the analogue and digital circuitry in a DAB radio last so long? My experience with DAB radios has been an increase in bubbling/no reception over time.
5. Degrading and fixability: And when this happens to an analogue radio, it may be fixable - meanwhile, operation tends to degrade rather than die completely. You have very little hope fixing DAB. This becomes significant when considering disaster broadcasts (and two way transmission, of course). People today assume there'll be roses and sweetness across the world for until the end of time. I'm not sure why. Maybe they're young, or maybe they're idiots. A system which doesn't require a chip fab to replace is essential.

Please define "efficiency in transmission".

Signal out / power in. For example, SSB is more efficient than AM because AM (full modulation) transmits half the power in an informationless carrier and doubles the information in each sideband. I don't know much about the power efficiency of DAB's modulation methods, though.

FM isn't robust, just drive in a built-up area and the multipath interference kills reception on a regular basis.

Yes, DAB is better here as long as you're not travelling too fast ;-).

FM isn't effective, it's a horrible waste of precious bandwidth.

Why the obsession with quantity over quality? Five hundred low bitrate stations pumping out shit is a horrible waste of precious bandwidth.

Finally, you might want to see just how much more spectrum efficient DAB isn't. The capture effect wat any radio ham kno offsets even the reusability argument.