Introduction to Wi-Fi radios

UK DAB industry trying to exclude DRM/DRM+ from European digital radio standard

The car manufacturers are insisting on there being a "common European digtial radio standard" before they'll agree to factory-fit DAB car stereos as standard in new cars. But the UK DAB industry has only included the DAB, DAB+ and DMB-A standards in the supposed common European standard, which means that DRM and DRM+ are being excluded.

I can't think of any legitimate reason for why DRM/DRM+ should be excluded, so it looks to be simply down to the fact that it suits the UK broadcasters' timetable for FM switch-off, so presumably the UK broadcasters clearly couldn't care less about what European countries want, and nor do they care what consumers want, but we already knew that.

The reason why including DRM/DRM+ doesn't suit their FM switch-off plans is because the new DRM+ standard isn't finished yet, so it would be at least a year or two before receiver modules supporting DRM+ would be available. So including DRM/DRM+ in a common European digital radio standard would lead to the car manufacturers delaying when the date when they'd agree to fit DAB as standard, which would in turn put the whole timetable for FM switch-off back by an equivalent amount of time as well.

DRM+ has been designed to work in the FM band, so it would be the ideal digital broadcasting system to be used in the FM band once FM is eventually switched off. DRM+ is also a very efficient system, so it would potentially allow a lot of new stations to launch once FM is switched off, and the audio quality would be good. So another likely reason for why the UK DAB broadcasters want to exclude DRM+ is because it would avoid the possibility of them facing future competition from DRM+ stations -- i.e. it's good old protectionist greed.

Other European countries would also lose out, because they could use DRM+ to replace FM rather than using DAB+, as DRM+ is quite a lot cheaper to transmit than DAB+. This raises another vested interest that could explain the exclusion of DRM+. Quentin Howard, the President of WorldDMB (who was dishonest about DAB+ on BBC TV), and who put forward the DAB/DAB+/DMB-Audio "Receiver profiles" earlier this year, which seem to have formed the basis of the UK DAB industry's supposed "common European digital radio standard", also happens to be on the board of the DAB receiver module company, Frontier-Silicon, whose products don't happen to support DRM. How odd. Also, with the UK backing DAB+ as the replacement for DAB, if they managed to squeeze DRM+ out, that helps DAB+'s prospects internationally.

Is Ofcom ignoring its main remits again?

I would be interested to hear what Ofcom has to say on the subject of DRM+, and whether it supports the "common European digital radio standard" that excludes DRM/DRM+. If it is excluded the standards, then once FM is switched off the FM band would no doubt turn into a barren spectrum wasteland, inhabited only by pirate FM radio stations, and its economic value to the country would become worthless, because it couldn't be used for any useful purpose.

One of Ofcom's main remits is supposedly to make the most efficient use of spectrum, so if Ofcom supports this European standard that excludes DRM+ then it would be flagrantly ignoring one of its remits, presumably simply because it feels like it, or more likely because they just can't be bothered regulating, as it's just so tedious and so much effort to regulate when companies could regulate themselves, like the banks for instance.

Consumers lose out due to DAB industry's short-termism

This kind of decision making that's taken to help sort out the UK DAB broadcasters' short term problems has been a common theme with the UK DAB industry, and it's invariably consumers that lose out. For example, the BBC could have upgraded the DAB system at any point from 1997 onwards, which was when the AAC audio codec was standardised. But they were presumably oblivious of the fact that a solution to DAB's dire audio quality was sitting there ready and waiting to be used.

Another golden opportunity happened in 2000, when Digital One paid Imagination Technologies to design a cheaper DAB receiver chip so that sub-£100 DAB portable radios could be manufactured. At the time, only a few hundred receivers had been sold, so they obviously could have added AAC then. But they didn't, and the overall impression I got from reading an account about the design of the new DAB chip was that Digital One's ex chief exec, Quentin Howard, who was sacked earlier this year, was in a rush to make sub-£100 DAB radios available. That's a reasonable goal considering that they were very expensive at the time, but considering that he knew that the audio quality was awful, I'm afraid Quentin Howard was grossly incompetent to design the new chip without upgrading the DAB standard to include AAC when such a golden opportunity arose.

Karma

The good news, though, is that their incompetent short-termism without any regard for what consumers want (i.e. not caring at all about audio quality) has back-fired on them, because it was due to the fact that they didn't upgrade DAB prior to launching or re-launching DAB that other countries turned their noses up at using DAB. This led to the WorldDMB Forum being forced to design DAB+ or else countries would desert the DAB platform altogether. And with no other big countries on board, the global sales volumes were kept very low -- efffectively UK-only -- which kept receiver prices high, which in turn kept the sales low. Additionally, with DAB being almost a UK-only standard, the two Holy Grails of getting DAB integrated in mobile phones and factory-fitted as standard in new car have never materialised -- or at leasst the numbers are completely insignificant.

On the other hand, if they had upgraded DAB prior to launching or re-launching the system in the UK, then the countries that did turn their noses up at using DAB, such as France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, etc, would most likely have got on board. This should have led to global sales being very high by now compared to what they are. And when sales are high they have a reinforcing effect, because higher sales lead to lower prices which in turn lead to higher sales. So we would have seen the exponential growth in the UK, and that's precisely what has been missing that has caused all of DAB's current problems.

There would also have been an agreed common European digtial radio standard, so the car and mobile phone manufacturers would have included DAB in their products far sooner. There also wouldn't have been any vocal complaints about audio quality, because they could have provided far higher audio quality.

If the UK had experienced the exponentially increasing growth described above, and DAB being included in mobiles and fitted in cars, FM switch-off may well have been possible in around 2015. By my estimation FM won't be switchef off intil 2024. If that turns out to be the case, then the incompetent decision not to upgrade DAB prior to launching it will have led to nine years of unnecessarily having to transmit analogue and digital side by side, which amounts to a lot of money effectively thrown down the drain each year.

Furthermore, this is all happening at a time when the number of people listening to radio is shrinking, and the poor audio quality and poor choice available on DAB has not proven attractive to listeners. Add to that the fact that DAB take-up is too high for a quick switch-off to allow DAB+ to come to the rescue to make the DAB platform more attractive to consumers, and you'd have to conclude that they're in a right old two and eight, really, aren't they?

Who's to blame for all of this, you may ask? There's Simon Nelson from the BBC, who was shipped off to TV a couple of years ago. There's Quentin Howard who failed to upgrade DAB when he had a golden opportunity to. But ultimately the person who's mainly responsible was Jenny Abramsky, the BBC's ex-Director of Radio, who pushed the rest of the BBC executive to go with DAB, and she almost certainly ignored the advice she was getting from the BBC R&D department, which had been keen on using the AAC audio codec ever since around 1996.

Jenny Abramsky retired from the BBC this year. Her pension pot amounted to £4 million of licence-fee payers' money.

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