
Norway to switch off FM in 2017 - Garbage
http://radio.no/2015/04/norway-to-switch-off-fm-in-2017/
======
rplst8
Getting 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.

~~~
bane
Right, there are basically two things I listen to in my car these days. Music
or podcasts coming off of my phone, and FM radio news. But other than that,
poor industry choices killed FM years ago as a viable place to find anything
worth listening to.

In my market, Clearchannel and friends pretty much screwed up the music
stations and nobody listens to them by choice. They either played the same
tired songs over and over, pumped so many commercials into their broadcast
there was effectively nothing to listen to (and coordinated commercial breaks
between various stations so there was no reason to switch) or "changed the
format" of popular stations without warning or alternative, wiping out decades
of legacy.

I remember when it happened with one of the most popular and historic stations
in the D.C. Baltimore area, WHFS. I was driving to lunch, jamming out to some
great music, they cut to a commercial break and the commercials suddenly
started talking about the latest Latin American bands. I ignored it, until
about 10 minutes later when I realized this was no longer a commercial, but
the broadcast!

According to WP, the station's staff didn't even know about the switch until
about an hour before it happened.

AOL, despite all the bad things you can say about them, was headquartered in
the same market, and ran a large-ish (at the time) internet radio system. They
ended up launching a streaming radio station with pretty much the same format.
But HFS was gone.

The local alt/prog rock music market has never recovered.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHFS_(historic)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHFS_\(historic\))

I've _tried_ to listen to music radio recently, and I think during my hour
long commute, I encountered maybe 4 songs, the entire rest of the drive was
absolutely _packed_ with commercials and station filler. I also found that
stations try to coordinate their commercial breaks with each other, when one
goes on break, good luck finding another station of any genre that's not on
break. And the breaks go on for 15-20 minutes. It's just unlistenable.

Supposedly, everybody is broadcasting better things on HD radio, but I'm not
even sure if new cars I'd by support HD radio, they only advertise XM.

~~~
zachalexander
I suspect what's actually happening is that they are playing lowest-common-
denominator music, which few people are thrilled by, but which more people are
interested enough in to stay listening to.

Put differently, there are lots of people that might listen to Latin American
music, and very few of us who listen to prog rock. Prog is actively repellent
to ~90% of people.

~~~
kristopolous
This is a common argument but the numbers don't back it. Radio station
listenership had tanked and market penetration of pop music with respect to
total sales volume is going down. The most popular song rarely constitutes
over 0.5% of sales for a given week. The only growth segments I read about are
for NPR and non commercial stations.

The real idea is that they want the most cheap to produce, easiest to sell
commercial on format. I don't believe that they care much about who listens to
it.

------
asgeirn
This 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
I 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
But 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?

~~~
cbd1984
Radio is worthless in an emergency unless there's:

\- Someone in the booth. 24/7\. No downtime. No autopilot. No sign-offs. No
bathroom breaks without someone to cover. No excuses. _If the weather gets
bad, have at least two shifts in the station. Bring cots._

This has already been a problem:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment)

\- A way to get information to the radio station when every other method of
communication is down. Satellite is not an option, because Earth stations can
be disabled by severe wind or heavy snowfall. Point-to-point microwave is
killed by heavy precipitation ( _rain fade_ , boys and girls) or widespread
blackouts. Blackouts also kill Internet links. That isn't even considering
man-made disasters.

\- Repeated, serious testing of this stuff, before it's too late, with real
consequences for people who fail. And, yes, in this context, having a good
reason _is failure._ Having a good excuse _is failure._ "Lessons learned" is
always, always, always _don 't fail._

\- And, finally, a guarantee that people will hear the message when it goes
out, not when their brother's friend's wife's accountant's CPA tells them, and
most certainly not over social media. _If SMS is more effective than FM in
this role, FM has failed at the task._

That's the bare minimum to be taken seriously as an emergency alarm and
disaster broadcast medium.

~~~
hga
While I take your points, see my other reply, it sounds like the Minot train
derailment is being used for anti-radio consolidation propaganda as opposed to
a real and useful object lesson about the role of AM and FM consumer radio.
The critical details per the Wikipedia article are that the Emergency Alert
System was not activated by any of the authorities who could do it, which
didn't include the radio stations themselves, and who's listening to the radio
at 2:30 am for putative local announcers to do their thing?

I think you're overly focused on immediate emergency announcements, where you
should not depend on normal consumer AM and FM radio, vs. in the US systems
like sirens and NOAA radios with their alarm system. Local consumer radio is
much more useful for follow on information, once people are alerted and desire
to find out more information.

~~~
cbd1984
> I think you're overly focused on immediate emergency announcements, where
> you should not depend on normal consumer AM and FM radio

Except this is precisely the claim I was responding to: The idea that consumer
AM/FM radio should be preserved for precisely that kind of prompt emergency
announcement functionality, _and_ to maintain communications after other
communications methods have been knocked out in a severe emergency.

The Minot Train Derailment was a disaster for multiple reasons, as disasters
often are, but my point stands: The FM station was unmanned, because it was
part of a national network and broadcasting a satellite feed, and the local
authorities falsely assumed there was someone there who could break into the
programming to deliver an emergency message. The fact the sirens _also_ didn't
go off is somewhat beside the point I'm making.

------
lordlarm
Although 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.

~~~
goodmachine
Bad luck, Norway.

The UK is in a roughly similar position, but our govt is unlikely to switch
off FM until 2020-ish at the earliest (was 2015, then 2018... now "whenevs").

It's sad to consider how governments foisted DAB on listeners exclusively for
the benefit of state broadcasters - the list of fails is extensive here: DAB
gives you demonstrably worse reception, poorer sound quality, more expensive
hardware, added costs to replace old hardware, added costs to run (4x power
consumption), etc.

The magic carrot of 'more channels/ more choice' thing never happened either:
thus, a bum deal all round.

I would guess the upside for broadcasters (cheaper infrastructure, more
listeners) may have been significantly overstated too.

[http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/sep/25/digital-
radio-s...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/sep/25/digital-radio-sales-
dab)

[http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/dec/16/digital-
radio-s...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/dec/16/digital-radio-
switchover-2020-ed-vaizey)

24 problems with DAB (2010)

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/apr/12/dab-r...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/apr/12/dab-
radio-problems)

~~~
rootsofallevil
I remember a few years back being dismayed when I plugged my brand new DAB
radio into my Kill-A-Watt and rather than register nothing like the FM radio
that it was substituting, it was showing ~ 4 W, going up to ~ 6 W when
playing.

~~~
synx508
Not enough is being said about this, there are still no really energy
efficient receivers and on a per-station basis DAB is also a lot more
expensive to transmit. DAB only becomes energy efficient at the transmitter
end because it's always transmitting a multiplex of many stations.

A few years ago I bought a battery-powered DAB radio so I can listen to Radio
4 in the bath. It will zip through a set of high capacity AA NiMH cells in
around 2-3 weeks, the old FM radio used such a small amount of power that
Alkaline cells made more sense and would consume around two sets per year.

------
userbinator
You 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
Hi.

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
They 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.

------
sgustard
After 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
In this case AM or Shortwave is many times better than FM.

------
denysonique
What is the Norwegian government planning to do with the newly freed FM band?
Release it to amateur music radio stations?

~~~
msh
4G data most likely

~~~
profmonocle
4G data in the 88-108 MHz band??

~~~
haberman
Please 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
First 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?

------
hsivonen
Weird 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
NRK, 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.

------
raverbashing
For 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
This 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
Sure, 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.

------
listic
I 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.

~~~
NeutronBoy
It'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)

------
sandstrom
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.

~~~
bonaldi
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.

~~~
_wmd
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
LTE does have eMBMS, but I am not sure how it works with IP multicast.

------
radiorox
As 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.

------
ss64
There is a golden opportunity here for Pirate radio stations to fill the gap.

~~~
sireat
This 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_\(English\))

------
flynnieous
I 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
The BBC radio 4 long wave broadcasts cover the north-east Atlantic and North
Sea.

------
nissehulth
Political move, pushed by lobbyists paid by the radio stations that have fewer
and fewer listeners.

------
th0ma5
With 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.

------
jessaustin
In this context, that domain name seems fitting...

------
Kip9000
What's that cool radio on the photo of radio.no?

------
sova
"norway is going all digital"

------
uptownJimmy
No static at all.

