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Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

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Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#171

Post by digi_owl »

varjag wrote: post #123
kagamine wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of just what I said. I did state "reportedly" and not provide any sources. I don't think I was being unfair to the EV market. However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport. Public transport is something I could have mentioned in my original post as it is not prioritized enough here in Norway and…

I actually agree that it's all about money. An average citizen cares for environment in abstract, but not enough to pay premium for it. What we have in Norway with EVs is government incentives for adoption at work. With biodiesel I remember there used to be some debate how much it can harm the food crops supply if the prices are competitive. So at least that is a concern. And specifically in Norway diesel is penalize…

The whole EV thing is a mess.

There was some old regulations on the books that allowed EVs to drive toll free and use buss lanes during rush hour.

Hardly anyone cared when it was introduced, because the major EV available were Think compacts.

But when Tesla introduced their sports car, suddenly everyone monied individual in the cities took interest. Because it was still a EV according to regulations, so now they could drive something that looked and performed just like the gas guzzler the neighbor had, get around tolls and rush hour traffic, and pretend to care about the environment.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#174

Post by taway_1212 »

kagamine wrote: post #159
taway_1212 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, buying a new car and junking the old one has to be less energy efficient than owning an old car and trying to use it less while utilizing public transport. I don't know about Norway specifically, but in Western Europe in general (Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland etc.) old cars are sold to less well-off EU countries, where they're still in operation for (typically) many more years. So, the Western…

That's something I would really have to see hard facts on before I could believe it.

It should be enough to compare the number of yearly cars bought vs salvaged in say Germany (the difference should be the export, presumably to poorer economies). Unfortunately, I don't speak German (or French, Dutch etc.), but here are the Polish buy-side stats:

This article says that the number of USED cars imported to Poland in 2015 was around 1 million:

http://www.samar.pl/__/3/3.a/91648/3.sc/11/Ponad-milion-aut-...

While this article says the number of NEW cars sold in Poland in 2015 was around 400k:

http://motofocus.pl/informacje/wiadomosci-rynkowe/14747/sprz...

Which means that roughly 70% cars in Poland are used ones coming from (mostly) Western Europe.

You could also come at it from another angle. Consider that a 5-10 year old car can still easily be worth 20-50% of its initial value. Who in their right mind would scrap it, when you can sell on the second-hand market? You don't see these cars on streets of Zurich or Paris, but come to most Polish cities and you'll be surrounded by them (a lot of them still have various stickers in German on them, as people don't bother to peel them off).

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#175

Post by digi_owl »

cuchoi wrote: post #148
winter_blue wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because the infrastructure for FM is quite expensive to run. Won't the free market decide if it's too expensive to run? Or is even radio run by the state in Norway? Otherwise, why prohibit private companies from licensing & broadcasting FM radio? I mean the free market would decide stop to broadcasting when it's not profitable for them anymore. Or is everything state-run in Norway? When I read "one member of t…

Probably they have State infrastructure, maybe it was never profitable for businesses to invest in FM radios in that geography. They still CAN do it, but they won't.

The infra used to be state operated, under a cooperation between NRK and Televerket (that in the 90s was turned into Telenor). In recent years NRK has transferred ownership of this to Telenor, and instead rents capacity from them.

So effectively it is privately owned and operated, under a "natural" monopoly.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#176

Post by geff82 »

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.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#177

Post by digi_owl »

dagss wrote: post #55

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…

And in the end it would be Telenor that benefits either way...

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#178

Post by freehunter »

Nullabillity wrote: post #87
audunw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> 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? None. You add a plain 3.5mm line-in plug.

Or better yet, a 3.5mm plug, USB, and Bluetooth. No matter what happens with the 3.5mm plug, USB and Bluetooth aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Might as well toss them all in to make sure it's actually future-proofed.

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#179

Post by Already__Taken »

geff82 wrote: post #176

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 yo…

Wouldn't we be better using this spectrum for even more data to stream anything, including DAB?

Re: Norway to become first country to switch off FM radio

#180

Post by falcolas »

catdog wrote: post #113
lb1lf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. -True, but surely one could simply allocate bandwidth in the 4G network to multicast at least the most popular channels? (This may be a very stupid question; I know a thing or two about broadcast networks, but hardly a thing about computer networks. It all…

> -True, but surely one could simply allocate bandwidth in the 4G network to multicast at least the most popular channels? (This may be a very stupid question; I know a thing or two about broadcast networks, but hardly a thing about computer networks. It all went downhill after Token Ring, as far as I am concerned. :)) Such technology seems to exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Broadcast_Multicast... I r…

> instead of just integrating it into mobile broadband networks

Because mobile networks are oversubscribed. They're simply not designed to support everyone using them heavily at the same time - it's why folks are advised to stay off cell phones during emergencies, or fail to be able to connect if they do use them.

Much like other ISPs, there's little incentive for mobile providers to build out to properly support their customers when it works most of the time even when oversubscribed.

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