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Norway to switch off FM in 2017
- sandstrom 11y agoIt's probably a good idea to leave old technology behind. But I was surprised to see that the new technology is linear digital radio, instead of using 3G/4G/internet to transmit 'episode' like radio. Linear radio is an artifact of the transmission medium. I'd guess many won't bother with it when most of Norway is already draped in internet access.
- hga 11y agoYou still need linear radio for things like emergencies.
- tomjen3 11y agoI used to think so too, but what you really need (or want) are personalized emergency messages. Already they do this with e.g deaf people who can receive the info on SMS. Imagine that instead of some message on the radio (which you may or may not hear) or a single alarm noise which tells you nothing beyond the existence of an emergency you received a push notification telling you exactly what the issue was, how it would effect you (e.g you don't have a car so here is where the bus stops for the evacuation busses are), and anything special you needed to know. You could make this infinitely personalised. Nothing like this is possible with linear radio, which can only give you general information, or specific information that is unlikely to be relevant for you.
- hga 11y agoI think your personalization scheme would never work in the real world of inefficient at best government bureaucracies (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=991&bih=621&q=katrina+flooded+school+busses https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&sour...). Besides the raw fact of an alert, it would have to e.g. note in real time where I am to send an appropriately tailored message.
- cbd1984 11y ago> You still need linear radio for things like emergencies. If radio is going to be for emergencies, make sure it's guaranteed to work in emergencies: - Mandate local control. No more networks piping music in over a network line. Network lines go dead, and then where is your radio station? More to the point, if there's no one in the booth, there's no way to get someone to tell everyone else there's an emergency. This has already happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment - Mandate that people be in the radio booth 24/7. No more late-night autopilot, and certainly no sign-off. Have cots or similar if the weather starts to get bad, so multiple shifts can stay at the station. (Hospitals already do this.) - Mandate that radio stations have their own generators. Multiple redundancy. No excuses. - Create a way to get information to radio stations even if all other information transmission infrastructure is down. Because that is what we're talking about, right? Radio as an emergency last-ditch information transmission medium? Satellite communications can get jammed by bad winds blowing Earth stations around, point-to-point microwave is killed by serious snowfall, and this isn't even considering man-made emergencies. So, unless you do that, you're just playing at being an emergency service. That represents the bare minimum to be taken seriously.
- hga 11y agoAh, I can see I sort of assumed that, given that I was born, raised in and have retired to an area a hair's breath from the US Tornado Alley, as we were recently reminded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado. We're deadly serious about Civil Defense, and at least the main news/talk station has what's needed, is for example always on the air live with useful info when there's a Tornado Warning. On the other hand, even if all the things you list aren't in place, if you have the basic infrastructure including massive penetration of receivers you can jury rig the rest given a little time and luck.
- acjohnson55 11y agoI think linear radio still has its place, like linear TV. If you want full control over your playlist, just use a podcasting app and hook it into the aux port of your stereo.
- kzrdude 11y agoRadio is essential infrastructure, it needs to reach all corners and valleys of the country. I don't think that's feasible with 3G
- bonaldi 11y agoWe should fix multicast to help make decisions like this easier. Right now each additional IP-streaming listener is an incremental cost on the broadcaster - radiating broadcast has a huge advantage here, which proper multicast would remove.
- sandstrom 11y agoYes, this is a good point!
- _wmd 11y agoOutside a few niches (zeroconf, IPv6 SLAAC, financial data distribution) in closed environments, I don't believe we ever reached the point of figuring out how to handle Internet-sized multicast deployment. Not sure what the state of the art here is, but IIRC multicast introduces significant extra state into every router and switch involved, and with limited ability to control who is able to transmit to a multicast group. On the radio network side, I don't think IP multicast has any specific support in e.g. LTE, so even if a mobile client could subscribe to a group its bandwidth usage over the air would be equivalent to a unicast stream. Guess this was omitted for the reasons from the previous paragraph. LTE has something called multicast but AFAIK it's totally unrelated to the IP/Ethernet concept. edit: whoa, apparently 802.11 networks handle multicast properly - stations don't generate layer 1 ACKs for reception like they handle unicast traffic. There's a ton of cool stuff you could build with this on a LAN!
- TorKlingberg 11y agoLTE does have eMBMS, but I am not sure how it works with IP multicast.
- scholia 11y agoBut if you have the transmitters, "linear radio" (ie radio) is cheap and green. You can add as many users as you like at no extra cost. Streaming internet delivery, by contrast, consumes finite and expensive mobile phone bandwidth. And if you're listening to "linear radio" as distinct from a service like Pandora, consumes bandwidth to absolutely zero benefit.
- mikeash 11y agoFM radio also consumes finite and expensive bandwidth. The difference is that it consumes it at 100% utilization 24/7, rather than using it intelligently. The reason there's no extra cost as you add users is simply because you're paying the full cost for all potential users from day one. Even consuming "linear radio" over a data connection has a substantial benefit over something like FM broadcast, namely that you can support far more variety in the same area. FM is limited to, what, a few dozen channels in a single urban area? Maybe a couple hundred if you add HD radio? Streaming over a data connection can support hundreds of thousands of different stations, instead of forcing people to choose from twenty examples of the least common denominator.
- scholia 11y agoWhat else are you going to use the VHF band for? There's no current demand to re-use the FM spectrum, and smartphones etc are in the UHF spectrum. Even if you could do something useful with the spectrum, it would still be a problem because FM is a global standard and isn't going away any time soon.... The UK has no plans for the FM frequencies except to keep using them for FM broadcasting. The difference is that, after the switchover, they'll be local instead of national FM radio stations. There's also close-to-zero demand for large numbers of radio stations (most people only listen to two or three), and such "variety" is inordinately expensive. Broadcast is never going to compete with Spotify, Pandora etc for personalized radio.
- lordlarm 11y agoAlthough this perhaps makes sense from a technical, maintenance and cost perspective it's, contrary to the NRK owned radio.no's opinion, an absolute horrible deal for a large part of the users. «55 per cent of households have at least one DAB radio, according to Digitalradio survey by TNS Gallup», which leaves 45% not currently having access to a DAB radio. Many of the having _one_ radio has this in their home and perhaps not in their most important place: the car. In order to elegantly implement a DAB radio in your car you need to attach a dongle to your window and run cables into a (sometimes) new radio altogether. Whilst this may be a simple procedure for _some_ it's for the vast majority a huge burden - both in terms of time and money (often costing around 3000NOK - 380USD). It's well and fine that they started the implementation of DAB in Norway in the mid-90s, but it's just in recent times that we've seen cars come with DAB reception by default. They should at least wait until 80-90% of all cars have access to DAB before switching over - which could take I'm guessing up to 10 years. This is like only supporting Chrome on important governmental sites - which would rightly cause an uproar on HN. Radio should be about accessibility and content, not the medium - which should change naturally and over time.
- acjohnson55 11y agoYeah, it's kind of surprising that they didn't mandate inclusion of DAB-capable radios in cars years earlier. Had they done that, it seems like the consumers would be much more prepared for a hard switch. This sounds like it's going to be pretty disruptive. Also, why do the radios require a dongle?
- scholia 11y agoSome of the converters essentially receive DAB and then convert it to FM to rebroadcast it to your current car radio.
- caf 11y agoRight - I think this stat is the killer one right now: - 20 % of private cars are equipped with DAB radio Surely the car the last redoubt of radio.
- hsivonen 11y agoWeird move. I thought various broadcasters had figured that DAB doesn 't provide enough user benefit over FM and fm win on compatibility. I guess codec proprietors will pocket some royalties.
- kristofferR 11y agoNRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, has actually been one of the biggest pushers of DAB in Norway. Their main public argument is that DAB provides space for many more channels, although their main motivation is probably their own massive cost savings of only producing digital radio.
- asgeirn 11y agoThis switch-off is not without controversy: - The initial requirement was for at least of 50% of radio listening to be DAB before January 1st, 2015. This requirement was changed in 2011 to "digital listening", including streaming radio over Internet and DVB-T in the statistic. The actual percentage for listening over DAB is not published individually. - 25% of new cars sold do not support DAB. Cars in Norway have an average lifespan of 10.5 years. - The majority of road tunnels do not support DAB, and will not support DAB before the FM network is switched off. This last point means using radio to contact drivers in case of emergency won't be possible at all, because: 1. The 20% of cars using DAB will not be able to receive anything while inside the tunnel. 2. The 80% of cars not using DAB won't have their radio switched on, as there is no reception.
- elsamuko 11y agoI think all these issues will be shadowed by the development of mobile networks. You will plug in your phone, listen to spotify and the navigation will tell you about traffic and accidents. There was a similar raise of concern in Germany, when the insurances bought the emergency system of the autobahn, which resulted as a non-issue, because shortly after everyone had a cellphone.
- mrkickling 11y agoBut what if there is a natural disaster like a Tsunami (not in Norway of course..) or a storm, or what if Norway is attacked by Sweden. Would a mobile network work in those situations, or would radio be better?
- elsamuko 11y agoMaybe not, but I'm not sure, if FM would work in that scenario. Google says, that there are two emergency broadcasting systems in Norway: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_defense_siren#Norway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_defense_siren#Norway > https://www.worlddab.org/country-information/norway/history/emergency-broadcasting https://www.worlddab.org/country-information/norway/history/... There is also an app for that ^^: http://www.umsalert.com/about http://www.umsalert.com/about
- denysonique 11y agoWhat is the Norwegian government planning to do with the newly freed FM band? Release it to amateur music radio stations?
- msh 11y ago4G data most likely
- profmonocle 11y ago4G data in the 88-108 MHz band??
- haberman 11y agoPlease elaborate for those of us who are not radio engineers. Why would this frequency band not be useful for 4G data? And what might it be useful for instead?
- radiorox 11y agoFirst of all, the 46/LTE require some bandwidth for upload and download. The lowest bandwidth for LTE is made to match the frequency spacing for DAB (It's actually prepared to replace DAB) with 1,4 MHz channels. FM slots for broadcast is regulated as slots with 100 kHz. A slot with only 100 kHz bandwidth will give you modem speeds, like 24,4 bits/s. So there's just not revenue to make so small speed for modern broadband networks since everyone need to share the channel. The other issue is that the band 88-108 MHz have so big coverage, so there will be problems with the cell spacing. So 4G via FM is not a business case. However, the DAB channels are already planned for 1,4 MHz LTE. So guess what will happend in the near future?
- rplst8 11y agoGetting rid of these older analog radio technologies is short-sighted unless there is a real compelling and complete replacement already cheap and widely available. FM (and AM) radio are great technologies. Just because they are "old" doesn't mean there is something better. In the US, Internet streaming (of existing stations), digital HD radio, and XM satellite rarely achieves a fidelity that equals FM (when the FM reception is clear). All of them suffer from unpleasant distortion. FM is not without it's warts, but the "errors" are less distracting IMO. They also all suffer from binary operation. They either work or they don't. FM fails somewhat gracefully in that the signal just gets noisier the further from the source you are.
- tyfon 11y agoI've driven in quite a few remote locations in Norway, and it's very rare not to have a 3g or at least an edge connection. I can stream music no problem while driving over the mountain between east and west (over Haukeli). Trying to listen to FM in these areas is a test of patience at best. Moving to use DAB is a mistake though, they should just remove them all and rely on regular internet transport.
- gtirloni 11y agoWhat's the cost of listening to FM versus having a 3G connection with no data cap for music streaming in Norway?
- higherpurpose 11y agoWhatever it is, now add the cost of 3G when traveling into another country in Europe with your car.
- ptaipale 11y agoPlus the hassle of obtaining a new radio to an old car, so that you can plug your 3G phone to it. (At least around here, most car radios do not even have an input where you could plug your phone's earphone output, and even in 10-year-old cars the radio is an integrated model which is not at all easy to replace.)
- userbinator 11y agoYou can get single-chip FM radio ICs for <$1. What's the cheapest DAB radio IC at the moment? Looking at what DAB involves there seems to be at least an order of magnitude more complexity. FM is not nearly as simple to receive compared to AM (are they switching that off anytime soon...?), but I think the cost of receivers is a big factor in broadcast applications - affordable receivers is what made radio popular in the first place.
- Okawari 11y agoHi. As far as I know. Norway has not been transmitting public radio on the AM bands for as long as I've been alive.(I'm in my 20s)
- radiorox 11y agoThey are transmitting public radio from Ingøy in Finnmark on 153 Khz. This is long wave transmitter to cover the Barents sea. And Svalbard/Spitsberge we can find a mediumwave transmitter on 1485 Khz. Even Svalbard/Spitsbergen is a part of Norway - FM and AM will continue on this islands.
- TD-Linux 11y agoThe license costs for HE-AAC alone are probably more than the FM radio chip, unfortunately.
- listic 11y agoIt's hard for me to comprehend, really. Of all the countries, Norway is the one that could afford FM, couldn't it?
- nissehulth 11y agoPolitical move, pushed by lobbyists paid by the radio stations that have fewer and fewer listeners.
- sgustard 11y agoAfter a natural disaster or extended power outage, all that digital technology isn't going to reach anybody. When I was a kid all I needed was a crystal radio to pick up broadcasts with no power source.
- sanoli 11y agoIn this case AM or Shortwave is many times better than FM.
- th0ma5 11y agoWith the US for some reason behind the proprietary HD Radio with DRM instead of any kind of DAB open standard, I think we can rest assured that analog FM broadcast isn't going away anytime soon.
- flynnieous 11y agoI do hope they've got a plan for maritime weather broadcasts. A lot of sailors from all over the world rely on FM radios to keep them alive.
- ss64 11y agoThe BBC radio 4 long wave broadcasts cover the north-east Atlantic and North Sea.
- uptownJimmy 11y agoNo static at all.
- Kip9000 11y agoWhat's that cool radio on the photo of radio.no?
- ss64 11y agoThere is a golden opportunity here for Pirate radio stations to fill the gap.
- scholia 11y agoYes, and they probably will...
- sireat 11y agoThis was my thought too, how far can an overpowered FM radio station on a high antenna reach? Anecdotally 50km-100km is not unusual. In the old days there were high powered AM stations (also known as border blasters) such as Radio Luxembourg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Luxembourg_(English) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Luxembourg_(English)
- raverbashing 11y agoFor those saying "why not replace it with 3G/4G", this makes absolutely no sense Radio is an unidirectional broadcast. One transmitter, several clients, no upstream communication. Simple receivers. Limited bandwidth If you want to use Spotify on your phone that's great, but that's a different service than radio. "It's so much less energy efficient than current FM radios", not necessarily, yes, FM receivers (the receiver part) use very little energy, but consumption will probably go down as well with new receivers. Still, the issue of shutting it down seems like a strong case of "just because"
- radiorox 11y agoThis makes sense for me to broadcast via 4G/3G. Because transmission via internet gives you access to awesome big data. And you're able to track your listener in more detail. Radio broadcast will never be able to compete with Facebook and Google without big data in the future.
- raverbashing 11y agoSure, because requiring a complex receiver and using separate bandwidth for each customer makes more sense than a single allocation of approximately 200kHz for all clients (FM bandwidth) because of marketing and big data. DAB is a good replacement for what radio essentially is, not for "listening music" which, while is a use case of Radio, it's not related to the technology.
- sova 11y ago"norway is going all digital"
- listic 11y agoI thought DAB is dead, really. How widely is it adopted worldwide? Here in Russia it hasn't even launched, and there are no plans for it; and I certainly haven't heard worldwide news about it for a while.
- DanBC 11y agoIt's pretty big in the UK. The BBC has radios 1, 1Xtra, 2, 3, 4, 4Extra, 5Live, 5Live Sports Extra, 6Music, World Service, Asian Network, and the BBC local services all on DAB. Radio 3 (love music and the arts) uses best quality, others use eiter lower quality or mono or both. And then there are a bunch of non-BBC stations.
- NeutronBoy 11y agoIt's fairly mainstream in Australia, at least in Metro areas. Rural areas have a mix of DAB, FM, and AM (with AM being the default for those living way outside of metro boundaries)
- jessaustin 11y agoIn this context, that domain name seems fitting...
- radiorox 11y agoAs a norwegian station that need to close on the FM band, we're very clear that this will damage the commercial radio sector in Norway. First of all: Commercial radio will die, however in Norway they will die first. Commercial radio is not able to sell big data on conventional FM, DAB and AM services. Facebook and other services using the Google PREF are able to give exact personal commercials on a very specific local level. Conventional broadcast radio can't beat this. UNLESS the broadcasters goes pure play. Broadcast radio do send unicast streams, and have still not made it possible to create revenue from it, even you can track what the listener looks like and know his needs are.