Introduction to Wi-Fi radios

DAB industry's timetable for FM switch-off – written while "merry" at Xmas party

The Digital Radio Working Group's (DRWG) final report for government contains an aspirational timetable for "digital migration" to begin between 2015 - 2020; then FM would be switched off two years later, or in other words somewhere between 2017 - 2022. But I'm afraid they must have been very, very drunk when they considered that 2017 was a possibility, because there's more chance of winning the lottery than that happening -- my estimate is that the most likely year in which FM would be switched off is 2024.

Only about a third of all cars would have DAB+ factory-fitted by 2017

I've spoken to the person from the SMMT who represented the car industry at the DRWG meetings about the timetable for DAB being factory-fitted in cars as standard, and he told me the following:

1. Car manufacturers want a common European digital radio standard (which is currently assmed to support DAB, DAB+ and DMB-Audio -- where I say "DAB+" in this article, I'm referring to the car stereo supporting all three standards) to be agreed upon before they will consider fitting DAB+ as standard in new models -- incidentally, the DRWG forgot to or deliberately chose not to include the DRM/DRM+ standards in what they consider to be a common European digital radio standard, so it isn't clear what's going to happen with those
2. 150,000 cars currently have a DAB car stereo
3. It takes four years for a new model of car to go from the drawing board stage to it rolling off the production line. And due to issues such as that the costing for a new model is worked out at the beginning of this process, and that ongoing safety and quality assurance checks have to be performed on an ongoing basis, it's apparently difficult to add new features such as a DAB+ car stereo to cars once the process is already underway
4. New car models are only replaced on a rolling cycle, i.e. not every Ford Fiesta model is replaced each year, they replace models over a few years
5. There are 30 million cars in the UK, plus 4 million other motor vehicles, such as vans, lorries etc.
6. Annual car sales are on average around 2.3 million per annum -- this is on its way down at the moment due to the credit crunch

Will all new cars have DAB+ factory-fitted by 2014?

The DRWG report says on this issue that an aspirational target is that all new cars would be fitted with DAB+ as standard by 2014, which is an optimistic version of points 3 and 4 above. This gives the car manufacturers six years to reach the stage where all new cars come factory-fitted with DAB+. It takes four years for a new model to be developed, so the DRWG is assuming that all models in the showroom at any point in time will all be replaced within two years, but the car manufacturers don't replace models as quickly as that. Also, it assumes that any new model would be planned to have DAB+ installed as of today, but the common European digital radio standard that the car manufacturers want hasn't been agreed upon yet, and the fact that the UK DAB industry has excluded DRM/DRM+ from this common European standard is highly contentious. Overall, then, I think the 2014 figure is overly optimistic.

Number of cars with DAB+ factory-fitted -- using DAB industry's optimistic figures

Using the above information, I've put the figures into a spreadsheet, where I've assumed that the number of cars that came factory-fitted with DAB in 2008 has been 40,000, and that number grows at a rate of 78% each year up to 2014, when the DRWG assumes that all cars would come factor fitted with DAB+ as standard (i.e. I've gone along with the DRWG assumption, even though I think it's unrealistic).

The following table shows the number of cars that would have come factory-fitted with DAB+ in 2017 and 2022, which are the dates at which the DRWG report considers that FM could be switched off by, plus a figure for 2024, which looks to be much more realistic:

2017

Considering that the number of cars on the road is 30 million, and there would only be about 9.9m cars with DAB+ factory-fitted by 2017 (which is itself using the DAB+ industry's optimistic target of all cars having DAB+ factory-fitted by 2014), the chances of all the other 20 million cars on the road having bought a DAB+ car adaptor are zero. The large majority of people simply wouldn't want to use a DAB+ car adaptor, which is the only other viable alternative to fitting a DAB+ car stereo. The reason why most people wouldn't want a DAB+ car adaptor is that it would mean trailing wires around the car, as the receiver needs an aerial, and they need to be powered. It would also be another thing that people would have to remove from the car so that thieves don't pinch it.

Also, considering that only 150,000 cars have DAB at the moment, and DAB was properly launched back in 2002, this shows that DAB car stereo aftermarket sales are tiny, so their effect on the total figures can be ignored. The reason why that will be is that car stereos have been built into the dash-boards themselves for years now to make them harder to steal, but that's also made it too expensive to install a new car stereo these days for the vast majority of people.

In my opinion, the DAB industry wiill simply have fabricated the 2017 figure purely because it sounds better than something more realistic such as 2022. The DRWG report says that an aspirational date for all cars to have DAB+ factory-fitted is 2014 -- and that would no doubt be the end of 2014, not the start of. That would leave just three full years of sales at 2.3 million cars per year, plus about 3 million that would already have it. So there's no chance that FM could be switched off in 2017.

2022

Even when you look at 2022, it still leaves about 8.6 million cars that wouldn't have had DAB+ factory-fitted by then. So, again, unless about 8.6 million car owners can be convinced to use a DAB+ car adaptor, 2022 is out of the window as well. And there's no way that about a third of all car owners would want a DAB+ car adaptor.

2024

In my opinion, 2024 is a more realistic date at which FM could be switched off. With 26 million cars having DAB+ factory-fitted, that would leave 4 million, which should be low enough to be a realistic percentage of people who would consider using a DAB+ car adaptor. However, I don't think the DRWG's report is realistic about its targets, so the next section uses more realistic figures.

More realistic targets

A more realistic -- although I'd still say it's optimistic -- target is for all cars to be factory fitted with DAB+ by the end of 2015, which using the same model as before but adjusted for this 1-year delay (with 66% annual growth up to 2015) produces the following graph:

In both cases 2024 looks a lot more realistic target than 2022.

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