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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

#111

Post by jdietrich »

ptaipale wrote: post #32
martinald wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most newish cars in the UK come with DAB as standard now.

Around here (Finland, neighbouring Norway), the average car on the road is 12 years old, so if we start to get DAB radios now, almost half of them will have it by 2025. Many more cars have right now Bluetooth connectivity in the audio system, so it'll be streaming from the phone then.

An aftermarket head unit with DAB+ costs about €150 with installation. Owners of older cars aren't stuck, but they will have to pay for the privilege of continuing to receive radio broadcasts.

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

#113

Post by catdog »

lb1lf wrote: post #93
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-…

>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 really don't understand why everyone builds broadcast networks using a separate technology these days instead of just integrating it into mobile broadband networks. Building separate infrastructures (even radio and TV broadcast typically don't use the same technology) seems insane. Also the model of having a few broadcast stations will most likely loose more and more dominance while users are shifting to streaming and non linear things so a technology which is flexible enough to adopt to that change in demand seems just right.

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

#114

Post by catdog »

kriro wrote: post #48

I wonder how smooth the switch will be (the article says cars are a big problem due to the price). I'd imagine quite a few people won't upgrade their car radio and you'd think...so what radio is way to retro let's just stream stuff and listen to mp3s/ogg. I don't know if owning a radio is legally required in Norway but if it isn't I can see the radio ownership going down. Once again you may ask so what? The biggest i…

Maybe one could just keep one emergency channel using an analog signal and make sure everyone owns a receiver (they are dirt cheap anyway).

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

#115

Post by kagamine »

varjag wrote: post #90
kagamine wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe this is primarily driven by money, but also a section of Norwegian society seems to believe that anything new and shiny simply must be bought and right away. In a country in which environmental concerns are marketed as paramount by the government and media there are some obvious dichotomies emerging. For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy…

> For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy, the costs and sources of power for building them are reportedly a lot less environmentally friendly. This is the kind of made up on spot arguments you hear from ICE vehicle owners. Until they switch to EV :) "Manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in about 15 percent more emissions than manuf…

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 car culture is. If the govt were serious, really serious about the environment then public transport would be much better than it is currently.

Edit: I just remembered another reason why I think EV is about money and not only about the environment: diesel engines could easily(ish) be adapted to run on renewable plant based fuel[1], but no govt is interested in promoting this. In fact they do the opposite, they tax the end user quite highly for pouring vegetable oil into cars even though a diesel engine run on veg oil is emissions free. The conversions wouldn't be very much more than when leaded fuel was phased out and we all put new heads on our petrol engines (in the Land Rover community at least we did this). New diesel motors could be manufactured to specs able to cope with plant based fuel (especially with a bit of engineering enterprise). If some one can give a good answer as to why this has never been a viable option except for hobbyists I would be interested to read it.

edit 2: without govt. or trade backing this company doing said conversions folded 3 years ago. But what a future we might have seen. http://www.dieselveg.com/

1. http://www.reedx.net/landrover/mods/vegoil/p2.php

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

#116

Post by kagamine »

sundvor wrote: post #86
kagamine wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe this is primarily driven by money, but also a section of Norwegian society seems to believe that anything new and shiny simply must be bought and right away. In a country in which environmental concerns are marketed as paramount by the government and media there are some obvious dichotomies emerging. For one, the electric car market markets itself as green and while they are running on renewable energy…

New cars were still going to be built though so it's better that they are electrical, especially when you have 100% clean energy to source it (dam hydro). The 24 month upgrade cycle is hardly unique to Norway; Australia being another where everyone and his dog gets a new phone biannually.

1. Tax breaks and other incentives boost new sales, so the number of new cars is higher than if the market had continued as before. There is an argument for that having an impact.

2. Not 24 months, 12. And it encourages people who would not have upgraded for years to upgrade every year, year on year.Do you really need a new phone every 12 months?

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

#117

Post by hvidgaard »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #5

Over 60% against ... but "more channels". OK solely money driven then. I have somewhere around 12 FM radios, ranging in price from £10 to £lots and 40 years old or newer. They all still work and often give LW and SW too. In the UK at least DAB is mp2 and an excuse to put out thousands of channels at horrible bit rates. Like down to 64k streams. OK for a noisy car, terrble for at home or headphones. They all work and…

The poor audio quality is a major issue for me. For some reason my ears (or rather brain) have become really good at spotting highly compressed audio. I rarely listen to webradio because of that, and only DAB with sufficient bitrate. At least with FM it didn't degrade the audio predictably, and in a way it is a far more plesant degradation.

DAB+ is supposed to have solved many of the issues with DAB.

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

#118

Post by Broken_Hippo »

lb1lf wrote: post #98
kieranelby wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if the crisis involves mains power outage - cell towers don't generally have backup power so mobile phones will be useless. Edit: Adding generators/batteries to a significant fraction of cell towers is (probably) impractical due to them being bulky, expensive, and attractive to thieves.

This is not correct in the case of Norway, at least - I believe (mind, believe, I do not know for sure) that telcos are mandated by law to have emergency power supplies available; whenever we have a massive power outage, cell service stays up for hours, if not days afterwards. Them being bulky is a major deterrent to theft, as a lot of our cellphone infrastructure is way out in the boonies and not really accessible u…

It isn't the Telcos I think about in this situation.

It is my own phone batter. Or my spouse's - he has a dying phone with a dying battery, which doesn't always like to hold a charge. I'll be good for a while, sure, but once I'm dead... I'm dead. If something would happen late at night, after I've fiddled with my phone all day, I might start out with very little power. Early in the day, and I could make it last most the weekend.

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

#119

Post by hvidgaard »

audunw wrote: post #80
dtech wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't the spectrum be used/sold for other purposes? Otherwise stopping FM isn't much use.

> Otherwise stopping FM isn't much use. I think the main motivation to shut down FM is that now that DAB is built-out sufficiently (or so they say), running both at the same time is expensive. FM transmitters are supposedly quite power hungry and expensive to operate. It will take at least a decade or two to free up the FM band for other uses anyway. Norway will probably wait and use it in a way that aligns with the…

DAB was significantly worse powerwise compared to FM transmission. DAB+ has rectified some of the issues, but it remains to see if it actually better.

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

#120

Post by hvidgaard »

snom380 wrote: post #76
dagss wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be cheaper to develop a system for mass-SMS in a crisis and publicize it than to keep FM/DAB running, and I bet the delivery rate of the crisis message would be an order of magnitude higher.

Many municipalities already have that in place (for sending out alerts about water quality etc). The problem with cell towers is that the infrastructure is more brittle with more moving parts. There's been cases where fires, power outages etc in small towns have caused base stations to go offline, cutting whole towns off from communication. Not to mention the recent case where penetration testing done by another oper…

If you know the inner workings of the cell phone network, you can't help wonder how it still works so relatively reliable.
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