News - Digital Britain: how the government plans to make Britain the digital capital

[Funkstar]

DAB radio by 2015 and ceasing analogue???

This is utter lunacy, what about cars? I know many people with new cars, high end cars, that don't have dab radios, my car doesn't have a dab radio and it is a well know fact that DAB + cars really doesn't work all that well.

Someone needs to shoot the person with that idea!

I say bring it on!

I've had DAB in my car for the last 4 or 5 years. As long as you have a proper external aerial, reception is good. Right now I have an internal glass mounted aerial is it isn't great, just line the internal FM ones are rubbish too.

[chrestomanci]

I've had DAB in my car for the last 4 or 5 years. As long as you have a proper external aerial, reception is good. Right now I have an internal glass mounted aerial is it isn't great, just line the internal FM ones are rubbish too.

I known that internal glass mounted aerials are not that good, the problem is it is often hard to retrofit a DAB radio to use the external aerial.

I used to drive a Renault Clio. A cheap small car. Like most similar cars, it had a standard DIN socket in the dash, so it was fairly easy to replace the manufacturer supplied radio with a DAB one from Halfords. Even so the steering column remote controls did not work any more, which would be a problem for some people.

I know drive a larger, more expensive car. The radio is fully integrated and there is no DIN socket. I cannot replace the manufacturer supplied radio with one of my own, so I am forced to use a separate FM re-broadcasting one, which is much less well integrated, has worse reception, is a bigger theft risk, and interferes with other users of similar devices. The situation will be much worse at the luxury end of the car market where radios are integrated with Sat-Nav, air-con and all sorts (think BMW i-Drive).

In any case, even external aerials are less good than FM, when I was driving the Clio, (with a DAB radio that used the external aerial); I was living in High Wycombe, which is in a deep valley with hills all around. As soon as I entered the town, I always lost DAB reception. (The freeview reception was fairly bad as well), but the FM reception worked fine. They would have to build an awful lot of extra repeaters to make the DAB coverage as good as FM, and even then they don’t fix the problem of the huge number of devices that they will render useless overnight.

[Funkstar]

I know it is going to render a lot of equipment useless, but they have 6 years to upgrade the digital broadcasts, and for manufacturers to get DAB in cars. I would also hope someone could encourage car manufacturers to make upgrade kits available. I'm thinking BMW and the Mini here.

Personally I think it's a good idea, although I know a lot of people disagree.

[chrestomanci]

I know it is going to render a lot of equipment useless, but they have 6 years to upgrade the digital broadcasts, and for manufacturers to get DAB in cars. I would also hope someone could encourage car manufacturers to make upgrade kits available. I'm thinking BMW and the Mini here.

Around half the cars on the roads now will still be on the roads in 6 years time. Almost none of them have DAB radios fitted, so even if the government made it the law to fit a DAB radio to all new cars from tomorrow, there will still be millions of cars without by 2012.

It would take about that much arm twisting to get DAB radios fitted to cars (or mobile phones, or anything else who's primary function is not as a radio), because DAB is not a world wide standard. Even in other countries where DAB is used, it is often DAB+, DMB, or uses other bands, so the radio sets are not interchangable. Because the market is so fragmented, it is hard for manufacturers of anything else to justify incorporating DAB radios into their products, because it is only a requested feature in the UK, and a few other places.

[Funkstar]

Aren't we moving to DAB+ too?

I'm sure I read that somewhere.

[chrestomanci]

Aren't we moving to DAB+ too?

I'm sure I read that somewhere.

I doubt we will be moving entirely to DAB+ as that would render most DAB radios obsolete. (Some are forward compatible or can be software upgraded). More likely, they will introduce some DAB+ stations over time so that people with newer hardware can see more stations and better quality.

DAB+ uses the same spectrum and low level protocols as DAB, but encodes the audio using AAC instead of MP2, and has better forward error correction. The two can co-exist on the same mux, where older radios will see the DAB+ station, but will ignore it as they can't decode it.

[Funkstar]

In that case then, car manufacturers one have DAB+ to worry about, as that will handle the UKs regular DAB functionality.

And all they really need is interchangable tuner modules. The channel handling is all software, with the same logic and display for DAB and DMB.

Once again this highlights the difference between the automotive and electronics markets. Just like SDHC being very rapidly adopted by the electronics market, yet brand new model car stereos with SD card slots still have a 2GB limit. (JVC, i'm looking at you).

They are basically lazy and unimaginative.

[mycarsavw]

lead the world, thats a bold and frankly complete bs claim concidering how far behind this country is to others

As for 50Mbps by 2017, why so long, adsl and cable has been in the UK (for most) since 2002 and most still cant get more than they did 5 years ago, infact if anything the quality of connections have gotten worse due to more and more traffic and the lines not being able to cope with so much data.

Below are two charts we put together to illustrate how the world's top 30 Internet-connected countries fare on speed of broadband access available, as well as on the price of that access. The data all comes from a June 2007 report (pdf file) of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/b...g.aspx?id=1088

We have a very long way to go to lead the world.