Why UK FM Needn't Be Killed For Broadband 108
superglaze writes "Alarmed by rumours of the UK telecoms regulator Ofcom considering a shut-down of FM radio in order to give more spectrum over to broadband, ZDNet UK's Rupert Goodwins has proposed another idea: the reuse of the mostly disused 'Band I' and the creation of a new, national open mesh network — a plan that could bring internet connectivity to everyone at very low cost."
Way too logical (Score:2)
No revenue for kickbacks
No gatekeeper to charge ISP fees
No gatekeeper to monitor who is being naughty or nice
Quick do it now and do it fast before Rupert or Richard snaffle it.
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To connect to the internet, someone in the mesh still has to act as a gateway - it doesn't happen magically, someone routes those packets outside of the mesh.
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True if they want to go to sites outside the mesh.
How many interconnect points until monitoring becomes impractical?
is there a way to fairly distribute the cost to maintain the interconnects?
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My thought was more, how many mesh points before the routing tables become stupidly heavy for mesh points to handle?
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Its not about connection, its about routing - how does your mesh node know which other mesh node its directly connected to is the best one to pass your packet on to so it reaches its destination? Or do your packets just bounce around the mesh for ever, randomly being passed from node to node until it happens to arrive? No, it gets intelligently routed, which means knowledge of the path beyond the current node is needed.
The current internet uses routing tables for that - they used to be simple (this class
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For the public good, a peering arrangement could be mandated. Of course, you'd have to find enough politicians who actually care about the public good to make that happen...
They can't kill FM any time soon (Score:5, Informative)
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There's one other huge issue - digital radio works via multiplexes, where single TX companies handle many transmitters. You can't run a single station on DAB; you have to go pay a multiplex. This costs huge amounts of money. Community radio and low power FM/restricted license FM (for event coverage, for instance) still have to be able to broadcast, even if you say you're going to put all commercial stuff on DAB, but DAB isn't a replacement for FM just yet. A lot needs to be done in organization and legislat
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Wouldn't suprise me if they forced this through anyway though for a short term profit.
Re:They can't kill FM any time soon (Score:4, Insightful)
Contrary to that most people belive, you do NOT have a god-given right to listen to radio on a device that was sold before the semiconductor was invented.
Whereas people do have a god-given right to wireless broadband wherever they choose to live?
Anyhow, the issue is not people having to replace the 1930 cat's whisker rig in their living room: its people having to replace all the cheap, modern FM radios in their bedrooms, cars, boats, showers, potting sheds, phones/personal audio players with expensive DAB sets which might not even be able to receive a signal and offer few other advantages.
Don't do it over night, but set a clear deadline, ie. 2015, 2020.
...and people will ignore it until right before the deadline :-)
You also need to have a viable alternative in place - currently, DAB is not that alternative.
I repeat it once again, dear Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Insightful)
Even though some problems can be addressed, things like inherent high power consumption of digital devices and the fact that a digital signal doesn't degrade well (and having more error recover codes means you have to transmit more signal per second worsening the first problem) will stay here no matter what you use. (the last will probably force building more emitters... or doing it the US way of not giving a crap about those too far)
And why the fuck is "analog age coming to an end" ? I thought it's best to use whatever technology does the best job.. but then i have the outdated 20th century belief that technology should serve man and not the opposite.
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Digital radio communication of analog signals makes sense where signal strength can be guaranteed adequate, generally 18 dB SNR or better. Except for the very powerful transmitters in major cities, the receiver needs to be within about 10 miles of the transmitter for reception to be OK, and even closer if the receiver is mobile (because the receiver moves through areas of varying signal strength.)
Going to digital for TV was a marginally acceptable decision. Most TV receivers are unmoving. Most TV is already
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Whereas people do have a god-given right to wireless broadband wherever they choose to live?
You can use your internet connection to stream radio if you so choose, so wouldn't this basically be a superset of what you could do before?
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You can use your internet connection to stream radio if you so choose, so wouldn't this basically be a superset of what you could do before?
Yes:
If you pay extra for an internet receiver.
If the location where you had the radio gets a good enough signal for reliable internet.
If you pay for the internet bandwidth.
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You in fact do. (Score:2)
The real purpose of these changes is mainly just to force people replacing perfectly good devices or buy digital decoders to enrich the pockets of a select few companies. (with the TV, it also provided the rich with better image to look at on their fancy plasma whatever screens.)
Oh, did i mention digital emitters are less efficient too, because they require clas
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Re:They can't kill FM any time soon (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly this. I have a DAB (Digital) Radio in my car. However, I find myself using FM (or even AM) about 20-30% of the time just to get a good signal.
Problems I've had:
In short, I'm someone who went and bought in to the DAB idea and I like some features (e.g. having 5 live and Absolute Radio available in most places not counting the above). However, I think DAB needs some serious re-thinks before it can fully replace FM. Unless you can drive the length of the country and experience the same reception and quality as FM then it shouldn't be replaced.
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A friend of mine who works for the BBC was discussing DAB with a colleague of his and me, and pointed out that apparently, DAB was designed to be used with a satellite acting as in-fill to give the expected blanket coverage. The half-arsed implementation means they skimped on the satellite bit, so that's why you get spotty DAB coverage. Not to mention the ancient crappy codecs.
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No offense intended against Europeans, but your UK (and later EU) politicians really screwed digital radio. DAB simply doesn't work correctly.
Over in the US we have a hybrid analog-digital system that uses the same frequencies as FM, and every station is independent of the other. No centralized multiplex that excludes low-power stations, and no downgrading of quality from Stereo to mono-aural. Plus each station can subdivide itself into 7 different programs, providing tons of variety.
And eventually when
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But overall, such digital radio systems feel a bit like an awkward transitional approach; possibly even almost a blip between analogue tech and "radio" consumed mostly via wireless IP networks (and those aren't screwed up in the EU, quite the cont
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Frankly the online radio stations aren't that good. Maybe someday FM will be dead and people will listen via their Internet phones, but for right now I still prefer my FM station. And said station is improved by the new analog-digital hybrid system. They've subdivided themselves into 3 programs:
1 - Top 40/CHR
2 - 90s
3 - 70s and 80s
Meanwhile the local classical station has upgraded from plain stereo to 5.1 surround sound. My new HD digital radio provides tons more variety than if I had stayed with the ol
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Then there are new models of Last.fm or Spotify. Or how most of scheduled broadcasts could be cached while in the range of something like WiFi; typically with, say, just the news and announcements provided live via cellular, on a much stronger voice-only codec, and also in most cases not strictly real-time.
Then there's how, at my place, "up to 256 kbps" cellular acce
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graceful degradation of quality (Score:2)
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I didn't play with Vidyo stuff, but I guess SVC might be one of the reasons why Gmail video is probably the best choice on slow & unreliable connections (like it was also with Gtalk / Gmail audio; quite a few of VoIP codecs seem to do what you ask about)
Which isn't such a problem
Re:They can't kill FM any time soon (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what Ofcom is thinking. Take-up on digital radio is low, costs are still high, and the benefits to the consumer are minimal when compared to digital TV. I really can't imagine people retrofitting every car and replacing every alarm clock.
Hmm. Is the DAB band any good for broadband? If so, I think we have a winner.
DAB is a waste of space: its redundant in the living room, with many of the radio channels available in better quality over DVB or internet radio, and its a non-solution to the problem of cheap portable radios with widespread reception. Kill it with fire.
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I don't know what Ofcom is thinking.
I don't know either, but I'd hazard a guess: money.
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It doesn't matter. It's always about money in the end.
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It does matter. If you knew what Ofcom was, you'd not say such a ridiculous thing.
Their front page [ofcom.org.uk] says "You can pay your Ofcom invoices online" "> Pay here".
And where there's a process with lots of money flowing through multiple hands, it always comes with free, pre-installed Greed&Corruption(tm) add-on.
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Don't forget that FM radio is used in many cars and they have a tendency to cross country borders - even into the UK.
This can be an important issue when pushing traffic information and news.
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Don't forget that FM radio is used in many cars and they have a tendency to cross country borders - even into the UK.
This can be an important issue when pushing traffic information and news.
Here (U.S.) traffic and news are mostly on AM. Does the UK have AM stations or only FM?
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AM stations are more or less exotic in many parts of Europe and are often secondary. In some cases AM is used more for international than national broadcast purposes. But people here will in general not notice if the AM radio stations goes offline - it's only a few die-hard listeners that cares.
And Sweden has - or is going to - shut down it's AM transmissions from the only transmitter that exists. Almost all traffic information goes on the FM band and is supported by the use of RDS [wikipedia.org] that can interrupt the or
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I'm in the US so my perspective is probably off for this, but After digital TV broadcasting I'd be dead-set against this sort of thing here. The switch to digital TV was full of empty promises that were perhaps outright lies. Digital cable is great, but digital over the air is horrible.
Before the switch I had about a dozen stations I could pick up here in Springfield. Now there are four, one of which is a stupid shopping channel (i.e., the "shows" are just commercials), one is nothing but country western mu
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Thats the 'free market'/US for you, nothing to do with DVB. Here in NZ we went from about 5 to 16 channels (only the original 5 are good viewing, and there is space for more) and where i live we went from poor res with bad reception to 1080i no issues. I don’t see the issue with signal fading, it takes less power to transmit digital so if they were to use the same power: areas where is was 'snowy' should be perfect, though the high res bandwidth requirements might undo the power savings. If you live b
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(1) Over the air TV is not a free market. It's a monopoly-based system that is strictly regulated by the FCC to only allow ~10 stations to broadcast in each city... one per ABC, CBS, NBC, et cetera.
>>>Digital cable is great, but digital over the air is horrible.
(2) Disagree. I don't have time to type every channel, but I get about 50 digital channels overall... basically double what I had under the ol analog system
abc,cbs,nbc,cw,myNetTV, Ion, wellness, nbc nonstop, nbc sports, coolTV, AntennaTV
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It sounds like you need to upgrade from rabbit ears to a rooftop antenna.
Since it's a rented house that's not an option, but I do plan on buying a signal booster. I saw plans on the internet for an antenna that was supposed to be far superior to the UHF loop. If I run across it again I'll probably build one.
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Signal boosters worked with analog, but have the opposite effect on digital (damage the data) and make it more difficult to receive.
Get a large indoor antenna like the CM4228.
That's what I use in my apartment.
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Thanks
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So "all" he has to do is replace his cheap simple antenna with a more expensive one with a significant installation step to get back to what he used to have? How is that better?
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It's not going to happen. I've been thinking about getting a DAB system for around a decade now, and still haven't been persuaded to invest. My car is less than 8 years old, so should have a good 6 to 8 years of life left in it ; the radio in that is certainly not going to get replaced.
Actually, the house is down to 3 or 4 radios now, which is a slow decrease. I listen to the radio on the computer quite often now. But retr
killing radio for broadband? (Score:2)
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I don't live in the States anymore, but it worked pretty well for my parents. They certainly get a much better looking picture, and like 15 channels.
digital TV is great if you live pretty close to the transmitters.... i live thirty minutes outside the cities, so my analog was not always the best picture, but at least i could get a picture, even if the reception was not that great. now it's either there, looking great, or not there at all, and it sucks when right in the middle of your show, it just goes black, coming back on only after you missed something important! oh well, it's much better not having TV at all, i suppose.
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It is possible to get good digital TV reception at long range. I get a very good signal from a transmitter about 40 miles away, you just need the right combination of a decent grouped (not wideband) Yagi and an amplifier.
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Unless you are behind a hill this is less to do with digital TV and more someone not willing to pay for the transmission power to get it to you.
If you are behind a hill then tough luck maybe they will someday be able to go to lower frequencies or build a transmitter on your side.
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>>>thirty minutes outside the cities
That's nothing. I live 45 and 70 minutes from Baltimore and Philly respectively, and both cities come in crystal clear. Because digital uses less power (about 20%) you need a bigger antenna like the CM4228. Indoor rabbit ears are nt good beyond ~20 miles range.
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It might be ok in Chicago or LA or other large market, but in the middle of any state it sucks. I had a dozen analog channels, now I can get four digital channels, and one of them is a shopping channel and one is country music videos, leaving me with two -- and when the analog signal would ghost, the digital signal goes away completely. It's like it was in St Louis in 1960, albeit with a clear color picture if you get a picture at all.
I suspect in the middle of a large city it would be even worse, with inte
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Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see a correlation with the TV digital switchover in the states?
Different technical system, different spacing of population, different time scale, different plan of attack. Plus different population spacing even means the suitability of FM versus AM is different, plus I guess you don't, primarily, have national FM stations? Our digital radio, DAB, is a crap early failed experiment in attempting to replace our national coverage FM stations with an inferior digital sy
Digital radio fails at being better (Score:3)
My issue with digital radio is that it isn't really solving any problems and actually introduces some. This is really the antithesis of what technology is about, the sense it should be improving in what went before.
FM radio degrades nicely, is of sufficiently good quality for all intents of purposes, is relatively low demand on power (transmission and reception) and uses cheap electronics. Add to this that in an emergency scenario it is relatively reliable.
Unlike HDTV pictures, I haven't ever heard anyone s
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"I haven't ever heard anyone say their digital audio transmission is better than FM. "
Let me be the first one to tell you I've had better DAB reception than the same station in FM. I moved to a new building and the FM reception inside was terrible, DAB on the other hand was crystal clear. Can't tell if the audio quality of one or the other was better, the receiver and it's speakers quality was mediocre itself. Soon after the tuner got replaced by Internet streams. The only working FM tuner left is the one i
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I think that due to going with the DVB model and thus requiring the rather complex OFDM transmission. If they had had just said you can use something simple like (differential) QAM/PSK in your allotted bandwidth then it would be less efficient compared to OFDM but still pretty much work like the old radio. I would think that decoding (D)QPSK would be of a similar or lower cost than FM.
The problem is to get as many channels as possible they allot crappy bit rates to channels to save money. If they did it 'pr
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You get half what you used to? You lucky bastard.
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I don't have time to type every channel, but I get about 50 digital channels overall... basically double what I had under the ol analog system
abc,cbs,nbc,cw,myNetTV, Ion, wellness, nbc nonstop, nbc sports, coolTV, AntennaTV, ThisTV(movie channel), RetroTV, MiND, LinkTV, JapanTV, PBS, PBSmusic, PBSworld, 24 hour Fox News, TBN, JCTV, Smile-of-a-Child, Enlace', Univision, Telemundo, Telefutura, Qubo, Lifetime, plus several independents that show old movies and shows (like Happy Days).
[Half] of these channels
Would Government approve and open mesh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Please correct me of I'm wrong, but an open mesh network would completely decentralise internet connectivity leaving the Government with no way to implement website blocking and three-strikes laws etc.
While a truly democratic government would support open mesh in the public interest I doubt our lot would approve it.
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however, open mesh blehsblash blah blah. so much talk, but nobodys shown a system that would actually scale to even a city size. yeah i'm tired of reading proposals which some bullshit spewers have even scored money with, yet nothings happening and there's a lot of issues to deal with. it's very easy to just draw a diagram of the said mesh, much harder to show what they should relay and where and how you deal with it being open
Um... Antenna size? (Score:2)
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I know dipoles radiate quite well, cos I have tried it :-)
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Not that I think this is a terribly bright idea, but TFA does talk about antenna size. And a quarter-wavelength around 70MHz is only 1 meter, fine for in a house or on a car.
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This is meant for houses in rural areas so antenna size is no problem.
As for the limited bandwidth well since everything is done from the mains it would be much easier to bump up to 64QAM or potentially higher, there could be a standard somewhere for using it with OFDM.
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Underestimates how hard mesh networking is. (Score:2)
I think this underestimates by quite a lot just how difficult large-scale mesh networking is. Last time I checked, the current state of the art didn't scale above small local meshes - it's quite hard to avoid every node having to know about every other node, and the schemes which don't have this requirement tend to instead have a hierarchical structure in which the nodes at the top of the hierarchy are a bandwidth bottleneck.
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As far as I understand DHTs, they still need routing underneath. The identity at IP 1.2.3.4 is closer to your hash target than IP 1.2.3.5, so you choose to go talk to 1.2.3.4 even though the real node is down (say it was on 1.2.3.6). But you still have to have the ability to get to 1.2.3.4. And there are no locality guarantees about routability, just liveness & hash distance on top of the existing IP infrastructure.
I think if you try to make a DHT equivalent of routing, you'd quickly end up with dist
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The answer is to adapt routing protocols where each node has an address and each node knows which of its neighbor nodes to talk to to reach or
Heck, just give each mesh router (and local systems connected to it) a separate IP address or addresses on its own logical subnet (as defined through CIDR) and use some variant of a existing routing protocol like OSPF that has already taken care of the hard bits (like making sure that you dont have loops)
Not sure which routing protocol is the most suitable in this c
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OSPF falls under the "requires every node to know about every other node in existence" category, and possibly also the "creates a hierarchical structure where the topmost nodes are bottlenecks" category. It's fundamentally not suited to this.
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The real reason behind killing fm... (Score:3, Funny)
The UK government (and, well, various lobby groups of course) is rooting for rolling out digital radio (the already outdated and creaky DAB) and since few listeners care for a worse listening experience ("mud bubbles") at the price of more expensive radio sets with shorter battery life, any other reason to kill FM radio is welcome.
And yes there's plenty of unused spectrum available now so that FM needn't be killed. In fact, there's a consultation going on right now about 600MHz which basically poses the question "what the bloody blazes shall we do with it? Any ideas? Anyone? Puhleeze?!?" virtually with exclamation marks and all.
Stop the half measures and the piecemeal crap (Score:1)
Why can the UK (read UK government) not just wake the hell up and realise that the UK is a lot smaller than Australia, and if the Aussies can get plans in place for a National Broadband Network, giving everyone a fibre connection to the home, and renting this network back to telcos and ISP's, they we could do the same here and actually create a HUGE revenue stream for themselves. FFS... have Ofcom own this network, and rent it back to the telcos.
Why do we not just stop bailing out big banks that cannot ma
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BT's estimate will be similar to all other private companies' estimates for government work. Accurate if they were competent to do the job properly. However it will cost at least twice as much and take at least 10 years to get working properly.
WTF! 20Mhz shared for Broadband (Score:2)
20Mhz! Don't make me cry!
A single WiFi 802.11g transmission occupies 16.25Mhz officially, with interference out to 20Mhz width, That's the amount of frequency space available here. But unlike WiFi that's limited to a couple of hundred metres an FM signal can go for miles with potentially thousands of transmitters in range, sharing the bandwidth.
With landline broadband starting to use 'fibre to the box' and getting headline speeds at or above the 54Mbps official 802.11g bandwidth and practical speeds ex
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If it would get the government out of my data once and for all, i would accept going back to 1200baud.
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>>>If it would get the government out of my data once and for all, i would accept going back to 1200baud.
Then skip wireless and just go with dialup. And you'll get much higher than 1200 baud..... you'd get 53000 bits per second. 106,000 if you have a dual phoneline setup.
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Dialup is still point to point, so a single point of failure/restriction. At least a wireless mesh will be harder to stop. ( not impossible of course. .but harder )
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Dialup is what the Egyptians used after the government shutdown the ISPs. It works and can't be stopped unless the government completely disables the phone system.
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Killing FM seems very unnecessary (Score:2)
FM service is a Bliss (Score:1)
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You will have to wait for all cars to get an update to digital radio too.
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FM is also good enough. I really don't see what problem digital radio is solving? Instead I can see all the problems it introduces: increased component cost, rapid signal degradation, increased power use and problematic during emergencies.
As to sound quality, FM radio sounds good enough for most needs.
If you live in the UK and are unhappy with this move let your MP know.
Cynic (Score:2)
Rupert Goodwins has proposed another idea: the reuse of the mostly disused 'Band I' and the creation of a new, national open mesh network — a plan that could bring internet connectivity to everyone at very low cost."
I don't know how it works over there but if it has any government oversight chances are they'll screw it up.