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It'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/int

It'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 12y ago
You still need linear radio for things like emergencies.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  I 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 12y ago
    I 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 12y 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 12y ago
    Ah, 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 12y ago
I 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 12y ago
Radio is essential infrastructure, it needs to reach all corners and valleys of the country. I don't think that's feasible with 3G
bonaldi 12y ago
We 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 12y ago
  Yes, this is a good point!
- _wmd 12y ago
  Outside 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 12y ago
    LTE does have eMBMS, but I am not sure how it works with IP multicast.
scholia 12y ago
But 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 12y ago
  FM 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 12y ago
    What 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.

hga 12y ago

You still need linear radio for things like emergencies.

tomjen3 12y ago
I 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 12y ago
  I 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 12y 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 12y ago
  Ah, 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 12y ago

I 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 12y ago

Radio is essential infrastructure, it needs to reach all corners and valleys of the country. I don't think that's feasible with 3G

bonaldi 12y ago

We 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 12y ago
Yes, this is a good point!
_wmd 12y ago
Outside 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 12y ago
  LTE does have eMBMS, but I am not sure how it works with IP multicast.

scholia 12y ago

But 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 12y ago
FM 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 12y ago
  What 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.