Norway switching off FM in 2017

mackersdublin

http://www.a516digital.com/2015/04/norway-to-switch-from-fm-to-dab-in-2017.html

bbability

It's just national stations making the switch but it's great to see. The first of many. They need to get the finger out here and quick.

doc11

bbability wrote: »

It's just national stations making the switch but it's great to see. The first of many. They need to get the finger out here and quick.

Meh,Fm is fine. We don't have 22 national stations that Norway has to make use of excess capacity. I dont see the rush to make nearly every hifi/radio/car stereo obsolete. For digital tv we had HD tv as a major selling point along with crisp pictures in marginal areas which was helped by falling prices of flat screen tvs and for many it was a conversion from CRT to LCD too. I don't know if there much of a digital dividend in the FM band compared to tv?

SpaceTime

That seems like a very premature move. DAB radio, unlike DVB-T for television really offers very few advantages over analogue FM, especially where it's combined with RDS in cars.

DAB receivers are still bulky, power hungry and they'll simply cause a lot of people to not bother listening to the radio or a big switch over to streaming services which will just impose costs on the broadcasters and add extra traffic to mobile networks.

I don't see DAB as a success story - it's being driven by "the digital dogma" at government level rather than any kind of consumer product superiority or technology leap.

This is just going to drive up costs for Norwegian consumers but they probably won't notice as they're pretty price insensitive anyway due to the oil revenue trickle down.

Norway is also too small a market to cause manufacturing of DAB+ chipsets and devices to be invested in: so you can forget DAB integration into mobile phones, smaller cheaper devices etc. there's no mass market.

castle2012

With the rise of 3g/4g , many people will switch to internet radio in the future

doc11

castle2012 wrote: »

With the rise of 3g/4g , many people will switch to internet radio in the future

Which would be an absolute terrible waste of resources and infrastructure both on the telecom networks and radio streaming servers. DAB as pointed out earlier in the thread will eat batteries on portable devices and with 3G/4G the power consumption will be even worse with the two way communication that will be required. And unlike broadcast radio 3G/4G will cost money in terms of use and eat away at data caps/allowances and will have nowhere near the same coverage.With 3g the more users to a cell the smaller that cell will become and slower the connection.

With DAB the cliff effect means traveling in poor coverage areas there is absolutely no signal and even buffering with streaming(3G) will leave you out of sync with the live broadcast meaning you could miss buses/trains/work by unconsciously relying on radio time checks/news alerts on your daily ritual to work/college.

One of the main reasons in switching of FM is to make more efficient use of the spectrum.If the consumers were just going to inefficiently stream the broadcast on 3g instead the whole exercise is kinda redundant

marno21

Not going to happen anytime soon in Ireland.

If FM is switched off a large swathe of the country will lose coverage as many parts of Co. Cork/Kerry/Clare/Waterford are served by FM signals that just about cover a lot of coastal/rural villages, where DAB simply will not work due to the higher frequencies and cliff effect

total former

Never going to happen here. We tried to switch off a single LW transmitter and there was war. So if we can't replace a fossilised technology used by a handful of people, we'll never get rid of something that's used by the vast majority and isn't that much inferior to its replacement.